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Mary Beth Hurt — who appeared in such films as The World According to Garp and Woody Allen’s Interiors — has died at the age of 79. According to Variety, the cause of death was complications from Alzheimer’s. Her daughter Molly and husband Paul Schrader announced her death in a joint social media statement. “She was an actress, a wife, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a friend, and she took on all those roles with grace and kind ferocity,” it reads. “Although we’re all grieving there is some comfort in knowing she is no longer suffering and reunited with her sisters in peace.”
Born Mary Beth Supinger in 1946, Hurt got her professional surname after marrying William Hurt in 1971. Her childhood babysitter was fellow Iowan Jean Seberg. She studied drama at the University of Iowa, then at Tisch. The following year, she was nominated for a Tony.
Hurt made her New York stage debut in 1974. Her on-screen debut was in Interiors as Joey, the middle sister between Diane Keaton and Kristin Griffith. She followed that with The World According to Garp in 1982. Other major film roles for Hurt included The Age of Innocence, Six Degrees of Separation, Bringing Out the Dead, Lady in the Water, Young Adult, and The Dead Girl, for which she received an Independent Spirit Award nomination.
Hurt turned down a lot of the film roles offered to her. “Fifty percent of the roles I’m offered in films are nothing,” she told the New York Times in 1989. “I don’t mean size-wise. There’s nothing of any interest in them. So I do the ones that are interesting, unless I haven’t done one in a long while. Then I’ll do one that isn’t interesting.” Instead, she kept her hand in the theatrical world. Hurt was nominated for three Tony’s in her lifetime: for Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ in 1975, Crimes of the Heart in 1981 (for which she won an Obie and a Drama Desk award), and Benefactors in 1985.
Mary Beth Hurt divorced William in 1981. In 1982, she married filmmaker Paul Schrader. The two had a daughter and son. Hurt appeared in Schrader’s films Affliction and Light Sleeper.
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