As the death-obsessed young man Harold Chasen in the 1971 countercultural romcom Harold and Maude, the actor Bud Cort, who has died aged 77 of complications from pneumonia, set the mould for mordant bedroom iconoclasts in successive generations of indie films, from Rushmore to Ghost World to Submarine.
The film, directed by Hal Ashby, was a critical and commercial flop on release, slated by Variety as having “all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage” and gone from cinemas after a week. Studio executives had been uneasy about the February-to-December tryst between Cort’s character and Ruth Gordon’s septuagenarian Holocaust survivor, with more passionate bedroom material left on the cutting-room floor.
However, when the film’s tiny initial audiences watched its misanthrope hero break the fourth wall to give a faintly demonic smirk to camera, it was as though he was letting them in on the secret of his own future cultural impact – Ashby’s film gradually built a cult reputation through repertory screenings and on VHS, becoming, with its Cat Stevens soundtrack, a totem of 1970s New Hollywood.
In only his second lead role, the 22-year-old Cort adeptly knitted the picture together, straddling both the ghoulish bourgeois satire of the sections in which he stages mock suicides and the tentative emotional blooming of his relationship with Gordon.
With his cherubic but owlish features, he was the face of the quirky nonconformism that later struck a chord with 80s and 90s alternative culture. “Cort was the first actor that I ever felt close to,” Jason Schwartzman, the lead in Wes Anderson’s 1998 film Rushmore, which was heavily influenced by Harold and Maude, later said. “I guess my life just made sense in a single moment. I watched it over and over while making Rushmore.”
But Cort was then pigeonholed as the oddball outsider – roles the picky up-and-comer spurned. Coveting Jack Nicholson’s headline berth in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he passed up an offer to play the tragic inmate Billy Bibbit, later taken by Brad Dourif. Having also alienated the brass at Paramount after refusing to do publicity for Harold and Maude until Ashby was given control of the edit, Cort did not work again in North American cinema until the 1977 Canadian Great Depression drama Why Shoot the Teacher?
Subsisting on theatre, he later regretted this attitude. “If I had it all to do over today, I probably would just shut up, take the money and not worry about it,” he told the New York Times in 2000.
He was born Walter Cox to an Irish Catholic family in Rye, New York, the second of five children of Joseph, a big-band leader and men’s clothes shop owner, and Alma (nee Court), an MGM publicist. He often had to care for his father, who had multiple sclerosis. “It was basically a ‘Cinderfella’-type of existence. I was fat, I was unhappy. I read a lot,” he told the LA Times. This frustration perhaps explained his close identification with Harold: “The material matched my life so deeply, it was like giving birth to an elephant,” he said.
He dallied with both art, making money by portrait-painting Rye residents, and acting as a teenager; at 14, he began studying the method under Bill Hickey at HB Studios in Greenwich Village. While enrolling in set design at New York University, he moonlighted as a performer in TV commercials, the NBC soap opera The Doctors and stand-up comedy at hipster venues such as Village Gate and the Bitter End, under the stage name Bud Cort. After seeing him on stage at the cabaret nightclub Upstairs at the Downstairs, Robert Altman cast Cort as a medic in M*A*S*H (1970).
Altman then gave him top billing in the loopy 1970 comedy Brewster McCloud, about a spacey recluse who dreams of flying. The film caught Ashby’s attention, and Cort was cast for Harold and Maude, locking him into misfit adulation; fans would leave tombstones and pictures of dead babies outside his hotel room. “Actually, I’m only as weird as the parts I play,” he protested to Esquire in 1972, “and most of the parts I’ve been offered have been pretty weird.”
During these fallow years, he lived sporadically in the guest cottage at the Bel Air home of Groucho Marx, his “fairy godfather”; Cort claimed that the comedian “died in my arms” in 1977.
A serious car accident on the Hollywood Freeway in 1979 – disfiguring Cort and bankrupting him due to a failed lawsuit – consigned him to forgettable bit-parts and TV appearances, in the likes of Tales of the Unexpected and The Twilight Zone, for much of the 80s. His only venture into directing, the 1991 black comedy Ted and Venus – in which he also featured as a poet stalking his muse – went straight to video.
But Harold and Maude’s accruing cachet resulted in an upgrade to his 90s appearances, which sometimes played on his pernickety reputation, such as the fascistic diner boss in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) and the “bond company stooge” stowing aboard The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004), allowing its director, Anderson, to pay back his debt. Nodding to his Catholic upbringing, Cort also cameoed as a mute God who descends to New Jersey to play skee-ball in Kevin Smith’s theological comedy Dogma (1999).
A further car accident in 2011 nearly tore his arm off, but Cort continued working, with a role in the 2015 animated adaptation of The Little Prince, topping up a long list of voice acting credits. At the time of his death he was working on an autobiography, reportedly titled The Whole Enchilada.
He is survived by his brother, Joseph, and sisters, Kerry, Tracy and Shelly.
• Bud Cort (Walter Edward Cox), actor, born 29 March 1948; died 11 February 2026
