Bud Cort, Who Starred in 1971’s ‘Harold and Maude,’ Dies at 77

Bud Cort, a veteran stage and screen actor whose best-known role was one of his first, playing a death-obsessed, 19-year-old recluse named Harold opposite Ruth Gordon’s 79-year-old, happy-go-lucky Holocaust survivor named Maude in the 1971 off-kilter romantic comedy “Harold and Maude,” died on Wednesday in Norwalk, Conn. He was 77.

A representative for his family said that the death, at an assisted-living facility, was from complications from pneumonia.

Mr. Cort appeared in more than 40 movies, dozens of TV shows and countless theater productions, but even late in life he was often recognized on the street for a single role: that of Harold Chasen, a precocious, morose rich teenager who falls into friendship, and then love, with Maude Chardin, who lives in an abandoned railroad car and is old enough to be his grandmother.

The film, directed by Hal Ashby, is by turns humorous, touching and melancholic; late in the film, Harold sees a tattoo on Maude’s arm, left over from her time in a Nazi concentration camp.

Though initially a critical and commercial flop — Variety said that it “has all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage” — through the 1970s it developed a cult following, especially on college campuses, where its quirky, anti-establishment sensibility hit home in the post-hippie era.

Today it is widely considered one of the best films of the 1970s. In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked it No. 9 in its list of best romantic comedies.

Mr. Cort got his first break a few years before “Harold and Maude,” when the director Robert Altman saw him doing stand-up comedy in Manhattan and cast him in a small part in his 1970 Korean War comedy “M*A*S*H.”

Mr. Altman liked Mr. Cort’s acting enough that he immediately gave him the title role in his next film, “Brewster McCloud,” which came out later that same year. In that movie, which also starred Shelley Duvall, Mr. Cort played a flight-obsessed boy who lives in a shelter under the Houston Astrodome and becomes a suspect in a series of bird-dropping-related deaths.

The film did poorly among critics and moviegoers, but it caught the attention of Mr. Ashby, who was casting for his upcoming film about an extremely dark May-December romance between a similarly introverted young man and a much, much older woman.

Mr. Cort was 21 when he played the part of Harold with wry confidence; many of his most memorable moments, like a fourth-wall-breaking smile into the camera, were his idea.

But the film that made him famous also made him something of an outcast.

He fought with the studio, Paramount, over edits, leading it to exclude him from much of the film’s publicity. He was later typecast as a character actor and offered only offbeat roles when he believed he deserved to play the lead.

He said that Milos Forman considered him for a supporting part in his 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” but that he lost his chance when he insisted that he get the lead. That part, Randle McMurphy, went to Jack Nicholson, who won an Oscar.

By his own account, Mr. Cort spent much of the 1970s depressed and out of film work, getting by with stage roles. For a time, he lived in the guest cottage at the Los Angeles home of Groucho Marx, with whom he became close friends. When Mr. Marx lost a tooth, he gave it to Mr. Cort as a gift.

Mr. Cort had bit parts in several movies, including “Pumping Iron” (1977), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, from which his only scene was ultimately cut.

In 1979, he played the lead in “Son of Hitler,” about an illiterate woodworker who is thought to be the son of the Nazi dictator. It did not do well at the box office.

That same year, Mr. Cort was in a car accident that left him with broken bones and a disfigured face. Much of the money he had earned from acting went to plastic surgeries.

He was back to acting by the mid-1980s but mostly in single episodes in TV series like “Columbo,” a reboot of “The Twilight Zone” and the comedy-drama “Ugly Betty.” He also had minor parts in movies like the crime thriller “Heat” (1995), which starred Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and the Bill Murray comedy “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” (2004).

Part of what held him back, Mr. Cort said, was his emotional attachment to his work and his willingness to fight directors, producers and writers over every detail of his performance. He especially disliked critics who gave him negative reviews.

After an interviewer for The Boston Globe told him to his face that he didn’t like his 1977 film “Why Shoot the Teacher,” a comedy-drama set during the Depression, Mr. Cort got up to leave.

“I don’t want to talk to anyone who didn’t love the movie,” Mr. Cort said. “I can’t believe that I opened up my personal life to you, and then you tell me you didn’t like this wonderful movie.”

The reporter, who wrote about the encounter anyway, asked Mr. Cort if he couldn’t separate his personal and professional lives.

“It’s the same thing,” he replied.

Walter Edward Cox was born on March 29, 1948, in Rye, N.Y. His parents were in the entertainment business: His father, Joseph, was the leader of a big band, the Joe Cox Orchestra, and his mother, Alma (Court) Cox, worked as a publicist for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, a job that involved hosting stars like Clark Gable and Judy Garland whenever they came to New York.

By high school, Mr. Cort said he knew he wanted to act. He skipped classes to venture into Manhattan to catch matinees and, after graduation, he enrolled at New York University to give him a base for auditions.

He had small roles in the movies “Up the Down Staircase” (1967), the high school drama starring Sandy Dennis, and “Sweet Charity,” the 1969 musical with Shirley MacLaine. Eventually he left college and began doing stand-up comedy. He chose his stage name to avoid confusion with the television star Wally Cox.

Mr. Cort is survived by a brother, Joseph, and three sisters, Kerry Cox, Tracy Cox Berkman and Shelly Cox Dufour.

Mr. Cort maintained a love-hate relationship with the film that had made him a household name, long after it entered the cinematic pantheon.

One of the biggest problems, he told The New York Times in 2000, were all the Harold Chasen groupies.

“Everyone assumed I was that person,” he said. “I’ve been through the whole thing of being followed around. People used to come to my hotel and leave tombstones and pictures of dead babies. I try to talk to them, tell them they missed the point of the movie.”

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