Bud Cort has died. Best known as the star of 1971 dark comedy Harold & Maude—where he played the young, death-obsessed Harold to Ruth Gordon’s elderly but vivacious Maude—Cort had a long career as a character and voice actor that stretched well into the 2010s. Per Variety, Cort died on Wednesday, after a long illness. He was 77.
Born (as Walter Edward Cox) in New York in the late ’40s, Cort’s first professional passion was stand-up comedy, performing in New York City clubs when he was still just a teenager. It was there that he caught the eye of director Robert Altman, who would cast the young Cort in two of his films in the early ’70s: A small part in his 1970 smash hit M*A*S*H, and the title role in his far-less-successful follow-up, Brewster McCloud. The next year, Cort auditioned for director Hal Ashby for the co-starring role of Harold And Maude, a film that would come to define both his career, and his public persona, for decades to come.
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