Mary Beth Hurt, 'Interiors' and 'Garp' Actor, Dies at 79
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- Mary Beth Hurt died at 79 after a four-decade acting career spanning stage, film, and television, and is survived by her husband Paul Schrader and their two children, Molly and Sam
- Hurt earned a BAFTA nomination for her film debut as Joey in Woody Allen's Interiors (1978), losing the most promising newcomer award to Christopher Reeve
- Hurt played Helen Holm opposite Robin Williams in The World According to Garp (1982), a critical and commercial hit that also earned Oscar nominations for John Lithgow and Glenn Close
- Hurt was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, where aspiring actor Jean Seberg was her babysitter — a connection she later completed by playing Seberg in Mark Rappaport's From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995)
- Hurt married actor William Hurt in 1971, divorced him in December 1982, and married director Paul Schrader the following August, later appearing in his films Light Sleeper (1992), Affliction (1997), and The Walker (2007)
- Hurt received three Tony nominations: for Pinero's Trelawny of the 'Wells' in 1976 (opposite Meryl Streep's Broadway debut), Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart in 1982, and Michael Frayn's Benefactors in 1986
Why it matters: Hurt's death closes a career that connected Woody Allen's late-1970s intellectual cinema, Robin Williams's commercial peak, and Paul Schrader's auteur output — a span of film history few character actors touch. Three Tony nominations, a BAFTA nod, and supporting roles in Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and Schrader's Affliction mark her as a connective thread across four decades of prestige American filmmaking, with an Alzheimer's diagnosis preceding her final years.
