BUD CORT
(29 March 1948 – 11 February 2026)
The American actor Bud Cort, who has died of pneumonia at the age of 77, was known for playing roles that were never straightforward starring vehicles but parts on the perimeter of everyday life. He was discovered by the director Robert Altman who cast him in the title role of Brewster McCloud and then he played Harold in Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971). At the time the latter was not a great success but has since become a modern American classic. Cort was also in Altman’s M*A*S*H, David McNally’s Coyote Ugly, Pollock – directed by and starring Ed Harris – and Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Cort also provided the voice of Toyman for the DC Animated Universe.
Bud Cort was born Walter Edward ‘Bud’ Cox in Westchester County, New York. When he was fourteen, he started acting lessons and, to avoid confusion with the actor Wally Cox, he changed his name to Court, his mother’s maiden name, but later altered the spelling to Cort (after the name of a Broadway theatre).
Bud Cort was playing in a revue when Robert Altman found him and put him into M*A*S*H in 1970. Bud Cort had a relatively small part as Private Lorenzo Boone alongside Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Sally Kellerman, Robert Duvall and Tom Skerritt. The film was a huge hit everywhere, including awards ceremonies, but not with the military authorities. It spawned a successful TV series which still plays around the world.
In 1970 came The Strawberry Statement about the Columbia University riots with Jeannie Berlin, and Jack Smight’s The Travelling Executioner with Stacy Keach. Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud cast him in the title role of a recluse living under the Houston Astrodome where he is trying to learn how to fly. It was the sort of part tailor-made for Cort, himself being something of an oddball, and it won him a Laurel Award nomination for Male Star of Tomorrow. However, the best was yet to come in Harold and Maude in which a young man obsessed with death hitches up with an old lady (Ruth Gordon as Maude) who inspires him to carry on living. It was a touching piece, both weird and wonderful, and it earned Cort Bafta and Golden Globe nominations. The film itself is preserved in the National Film Registry at the behest of the Library of Congress. It is also on the list of the American Film Institute’s 100 Best Romantic Comedies.
Perhaps Cort’s career never reached these dizzy heights again, although he continued to make films which were mainly time-fillers. He was in Roger Corman’s Gas-s-s-s but his scenes in Pumping Iron (1977) were deleted. He had the title role in The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud with Carol Kane and Klaus Kinski, and was the voice of Edgar the Computer in Electric Dreams (both 1984). Invaders from Mars was Tobe Hooper’s 1986 science fiction horror with Cort as a doctor opposite Karen Black, Timothy Bottoms and Louise Fletcher. He was also in Michael Mann’s Heat, as an uncredited restaurant manager, and played a shopkeeper in I Woke Up Early the Day I Died in 1998 from an unpublished screenplay by Ed Wood. Bud Cort’s last film role was the voice of The King in The Little Prince in 2015. His television work stretched from Columbo in 1970 to an episode of Eagleheart in 2012 while taking in Tales of the Unexpected, Bates Motel, The Twilight Zone, Ugly Betty, etc.
In 1979 Bud Cort was in a car crash in which he nearly died when his car collided with an abandoned vehicle on the Hollywood Freeway. He broke an arm and a leg and was concussed with a fractured skull, his face severely lacerated and lower lip nearly severed. He had plastic surgery, heavy hospital bills, a lost court case and a hiatus in his career. The actor never married but had an early relationship with the actress Jeannie Berlin, daughter of Elaine May, from when they worked together writing and performing routines at Manhattan’s Upstairs at the Downstairs comedy club.
MICHAEL DARVELL