He Played 'Harold' to Ruth Gordon's 'Maude'

Bud Cort, whose offbeat turn in Harold and Maude made him a cult-film fixture, has died at 77 after a long illness. Friend and veteran TV producer Dorian Hannaway tells KABC that Cort died Wednesday in Connecticut. A rep for Cort's family tells the New York Times he died at an assisted-living facility from pneumonia complications. Born Walter Edward Cox in Rye, New York, in 1948, Cort got his start doing standup in the Big Apple in the late 1960s, where director Robert Altman spotted him and cast him in M-A-S-H and Brewster McCloud, both released in 1970, reports the East Bay Times.

His defining role arrived the next year with Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude, in which he played a morbid, privileged young man who falls for a much older woman, a Holocaust survivor played by Ruth Gordon. The dark romantic comedy eventually became a cult favorite and landed on the American Film Institute's list of top romantic comedies. Writer-director Cameron Crowe summed it up for AFI as "a young man obsessed with death" who falls for "an old woman obsessed with life" and called its Cat Stevens soundtrack music that "scratches at your soul."

Cort later said the part that made him famous also boxed him in. "I was typecast to the point where I didn't make a film for five years," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1996, noting that he even turned down a role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Still, he built a steady, if quieter, career over nearly five decades, including roles in Heat, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, Dogma, Coyote Ugly, and Pollock, along with voice work in animated projects like Static Shock, Justice League Unlimited, and The Little Prince.