MARY BETH HURT

(26 September 1946 – 28 March 2026)

Besides her high-profile marriages to the actor William Hurt (1971-1982) and the filmmaker Paul Schrader (1983-), Mary Beth Hurt carved herself quite a respectable career as a character actress. Before she broke into film with Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978), alongside Diane Keaton and Geraldine Page, she made her debut on Broadway in William Congreve’s Love For Love (1974) opposite Glenn Close, for which she received the Clarence Derwent Award for best supporting actress. In 1976 she garnered a Tony nomination for Pinero’s Trelawny of the ‘Wells’, appearing on stage with an up-and-coming actress called Meryl Streep. She was nominated for further Tonys for Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart (1982) and Michael Frayn’s Benefactors (1986). On screen, she scored a considerable success as the spirited, unfaithful wife of Robin Williams in The World According to Garp (1982), but was never to live up to that early promise, at least on film. Since then her most notable credits include Bob Balaban’s blackly comic Parents (1989), James Ivory’s Slaves of New York (1989) and Martin Campbell’s legal thriller Defenseless (1991) in which she played a woman accused of murdering her husband. In 1992 she had a supporting role as a psychic in Light Sleeper (1992), written and directed by her husband Paul Schrader, and went on to appear in his films Affliction (1997), with Nick Nolte, and The Walker (2007), with Woody Harrelson, Kristin Scott Thomas and Lauren Bacall. In her last film, Change in the Air (2018), co-starring Aidan Quinn and Rachel Brosnahan, she received top-billing, but the drama was slated by the critics and all but disappeared. Her other accolades included an Independent Spirit Award for her performance as the wife of a suspected serial killer in the thriller The Dead Girl (2006).

She died from Alzheimer’s, aged 79, and is survived by Schrader and their children Molly and Sam.

JAMES CAMERON-WILSON