Mary Beth Hurt: Broadway and film actress dead at 79

Mary Beth Hurt, a Tony Award-nominated actress who starred on Broadway in Benefactors with Glenn Close and reunited with Close for the movie The World According to Garp, has died.

She was 79.

Hurt died on Saturday in New Jersey after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2015, according to her daughter, Molly Schrader.

Hurt was the wife of filmmaker Paul Schrader and appeared in his movies Affliction and Light Sleeper. He had moved into Hunt’s senior-living facility in 2023 to stay close to her.

“She was an actress, a wife, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a friend,” her daughter wrote in an Instagram post, saying Hurt took on those roles “with grace and a kind ferocity.”

“Although we’re grieving there is some comfort in knowing she is no longer suffering and is reunited with her sisters in peace,” she added.

The Iowa-born Hurt, who graduated from New York University’s graduate theatre studies program in 1969, earned three Tony nominations during her career, for performances in “relawny of the Wells in 1975, Crimes of the Heart in 1981 and Benefactors in 1985. She was last on Broadway playing a nun in a revival of The House of Blue Leaves in 2011 with Ben Stiller and Edie Falco.

“I’ve never been extremely comfortable playing the lead,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2010.

“I don’t like the responsibility; there’s a feeling that I have to be good. Besides, I found secondary parts much more interesting, especially when I was younger and the ingénue roles were pretty bland.”

Her movie credits include Six Degrees of Separation in 1993, Chilly Scenes of Winter in 1979, The Age of Innocence in 1993, Autumn in New York in 2000, The Exorcism of Emily Rose in 2005,The Dead Girl” in 2006, Lady in the Water also 2006 and Young Adult in 2011. She made her made her big-screen debut in Woody Allen’s Interiors in 1978.

Hurt was married to late actor William Hurt from 1971 to 1982 and married Schrader in 1983. She is also survived by a son, Sam.