Mary Beth Hurt, Tony-nominated actor who worked with husband Paul Schrader, dies at 79
Mary Beth Hurt, the three-time Tony-nominated actor who enjoyed a 40-year film career, has died. She was 79.
Hurt played a memorable role in the 1982 Robin Williams comedy-drama The World According to Garp, and worked with director Martin Scorsese in The Age of Innocence and Bringing Out the Dead.
She also collaborated with her husband, writer-director Paul Schrader, on films such as Light Sleeper (1992) and Affliction (1997).
Her death was announced on Facebook by Schrader and their daughter, Molly. The post read, per Variety: “She was an actress, a wife, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a friend, and she took on all those roles with grace and kind ferocity.
“Although we’re all grieving there is some comfort in knowing she is no longer suffering and reunited with her sisters in peace.”
Hurt was born Mary Beth Supinger in Marshalltown, Iowa, on September 25, 1946. As a child, she was babysat by Jean Seberg, a Marshalltown local who went on to become an icon of the French New Wave.
As a teenager, Hurt studied drama at the University of Iowa and at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In 1971, she married actor William Hurt. They divorced in 1982.
Hurt first appeared on stage in New York in 1974. She became a fixture on Broadway and was nominated for a Tony Award three times for her performances in Trelawny of the Wells, Crimes of the Heart, and Benefactors.
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She made her film debut in Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978), and was nominated for the BAFTA for Best Newcomer. In 1982’s The World According to Garp, she played Helen Holm Garp.
In Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993) she played the socialite Regina Beaufort. In 1995, she lent her voice to Mark Rappaport’s documentary From the Journals of Jean Seberg, in which she played Seberg.
She made her final film appearance in the 2018 drama Change in the Air.
Hurt also had an extensive television career, starting with an appearance in the television film Ann in Blue in 1976. In 1992, she made a guest appearance on Saturday Night Live, which was hosted by her friend, Glenn Close. Her last television appearance was in an episode of Law & Order in 2009.
In 1983, she married the filmmaker Paul Schrader. The couple had two children, Molly and Sam. In 2023, Schrader announced that Hurt had been placed in a memory care facility as a result of her advancing Alzheimer’s disease.
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