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The thoughtful, understated actor Mary Beth Hurt, who has died aged 79, enjoyed the good fortune of seeing her early career intersect with an unusually intellectual moment in American cinema. She earned a Bafta nomination as one of the three sisters in Woody Allen’s Chekhov-via-Bergman experiment Interiors (1978) before causing onscreen havoc as Robin Williams’s frisky college professor wife in the John Irving adaptation The World According to Garp (1982).
In Interiors, Hurt – making her movie debut – was cast as the directionless Joey, who belatedly achieves a kind of purpose in attempting to save her overbearing mother (Geraldine Page) from drowning. By far Allen’s gloomiest vision, the film nevertheless made $10m off a $3m budget, while Hurt did more than tread water in illustrious company. Though she lost out in Bafta’s most promising newcomer category to Christopher Reeve as Superman, the film’s minor-key success prefigured Hurt’s four-decade big-screen career.
There were early missteps. Hurt beat Jamie Lee Curtis to the female lead in Joan Micklin Silver’s Head Over Heels (1979) – in which she played the married woman beguiling a civil servant (John Heard) – but the film suffered from studio jitters and an enforced happy ending. “Mr Heard and Miss Hurt are two of our best young actors,” sighed the New York Times’s Vincent Canby, “but the material is either thin and unfocused or rich and besides the point.”
Worse was to follow with the marital melodrama A Change of Seasons (1980), in which Shirley MacLaine, Anthony Hopkins and Bo Derek formed an altogether unlikely love triangle. Hurt, cast as MacLaine and Hopkins’s daughter, had a ringside seat as her onscreen parents rowed on set; Derek, meanwhile, fell out with the original director Noel Black, who was fired and replaced with Richard Lang. Even reshoots featuring Hopkins and Derek romping in a hot tub did little to tempt cinemagoers.
The World According to Garp, then, appeared to be a lifeline. Hurt’s character, Helen Holm, proved central to the film’s most memorable scene: Williams, playing the eponymous TS Garp, correctly suspecting his wife of infidelity, races home in a state of agitation and crashes his car, containing the couple’s two children, into another in which Helen is performing oral sex on her younger lover. (The lover is sorely wounded; one child is killed, the other blinded.)
Remarkably, this tonal rollercoaster – which also featured, in passing, John Lithgow as a transsexual football player – proved both a critical and commercial hit, gaining Oscar nominations for Lithgow and Glenn Close, a Broadway friend of Hurt’s, as Williams’s radical mother. For Hurt, it was a rare opportunity to play an unabashedly sexual woman: “I’ve never been cast as a mistress. I’m the girl men marry, not the girl they have affairs with.”
She was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, the daughter of Forrest Supinger, a wartime army officer, and his wife Dolores (nee Andre). In an early brush with fame, one of her babysitters was the aspiring actor Jean Seberg, whose family lived nearby. “Marshalltown went sort of crazy with Seberg,” she later recalled. “I remember there was a parade. She came back from shooting Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan, I think. And all the kids just ran outside.”
The young Mary Beth studied drama at the University of Iowa and acting at the New York University School of the Arts, where her classmates included William Hurt, whom she married in 1971. Her early stage career established her versatility: she debuted in 1973 playing a 98-year-old Vietnamese man, alongside the young Meat Loaf, in Jim Steinman and Michael Weller’s rock musical More Than You Deserve.
She debuted on Broadway in 1974 in a revival of William Congreve’s Love For Love opposite Close, then began to pick up TV gigs, playing a police officer in Ann in Blue (1974) and a troubled skater in A Shield for Murder, a two-part Kojak in 1976. In the same year Hurt landed her first Tony nomination for her performance in Pinero’s Trelawny of the ‘Wells’, opposite a debuting Meryl Streep; her second was for a 1982 revival of Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart.
After divorcing William Hurt in December 1982, she married the director Paul Schrader the following August. (She later appeared in Schrader’s Light Sleeper (1992), Affliction (1997) and The Walker (2007).) She was nominated for a third Tony in 1986 for Michael Frayn’s Benefactors; had a role as a suspected cannibal in Bob Balaban’s droll black comedy Parents (1989); and played Manhattan grandes dames in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation (both 1993).
Hurt eventually played Seberg in Mark Rappaport’s inventive cinephile tribute From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995). She was also nominated for an Independent Spirit award as a wife who suspects her husband may be a killer in Karen Moncrieff’s clever feminist fable The Dead Girl (2006).
Her final stage role was in the 2011 revival of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves; her final film, before an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, was the smalltown drama Change in the Air (2018).
There again, Hurt took a supporting role, a preference she explained in 2009: “I never felt very beautiful or incredibly smart or witty, so I was always looking for something about [these roles] that intrigued me … You walk down the street and you see people and you realise that every person chose the clothing they’re going to wear for the day. It means you’ve costumed yourself, and that you’re presenting yourself in a way that you want the world to see you. And I find that fascinating; more fascinating, really, than the gold medal moments. It’s the secondary things.”
She is survived by Schrader and the couple’s two children, Molly and Sam.
