Bud Cort

Walter Edward Cox was born on 29 March 1948 and grew up in Rye, New York, in an Irish Catholic family. (Most obituaries, including The Guardian, Variety and his family's notice, place his birth and childhood in Rye; The Hollywood Reporter gave New Rochelle as his birthplace.) He was the second of five children of Joseph Cox, a big-band leader who also ran a men's clothing shop, and Alma Cox (nee Court), a publicist for MGM. His father had multiple sclerosis, and Bud often helped look after him. He told the Los Angeles Times that his childhood was "basically a 'Cinderfella'-type of existence. I was fat, I was unhappy. I read a lot."

He showed talent in both visual and performing arts from an early age. He took classes at the Rye Art Center and was commissioned by Rye families to paint portraits of their loved ones, using the money, along with bake sale earnings, to take the train into Manhattan to see plays. He often skipped school to see Broadway matinees, especially Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand, and waited at the stage door with Streisand's younger sister Roslyn Kind, who became a close friend.

Cort attended Resurrection Grammar School in Rye and Iona Preparatory School, where he threw himself into every side of school theatre, from lighting and set design to make-up and acting. At 14 he began studying acting with William Hickey at HB Studio in Greenwich Village, and he later studied with Stella Adler. He enrolled at New York University's School of the Arts as a scenic art and set design student, having first been turned away from its full acting classes, but he left to train full time. To avoid being confused with the actor Wally Cox, he adopted his mother's maiden name, Court, as his stage surname, respelling it after Broadway's Cort Theatre.

Cort's first screen work was as an uncredited student extra in Up the Down Staircase (1967) and a hippie in Sweet Charity (1969). He appeared in television commercials and on the NBC soap opera The Doctors, and he performed stand-up comedy at Greenwich Village venues including the Village Gate and the Bitter End. After moving to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, he was spotted by director Robert Altman while performing in a revue. Altman cast him as Private Lorenzo Boone in M*A*S*H (1970) and then gave him top billing in Brewster McCloud (1970), playing a reclusive young man who builds wings to fly inside the Houston Astrodome. He also appeared that year in The Strawberry Statement and The Traveling Executioner. Brewster McCloud earned him a Laurel Award nomination as a male star of tomorrow.

In Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude (1971), written by Colin Higgins, Cort played Harold Chasen, a wealthy, morbid young man who fakes suicides to provoke his mother and attends funerals of strangers, where he meets Maude Chardin, a joyful 79-year-old Holocaust survivor played by Ruth Gordon. His chemistry with Gordon at his audition won him the part. The film was a critical and commercial failure on release; Variety said it had "all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage". It slowly built a devoted following through campus and repertory screenings and home video, ran for two years in Paris, and became one of the great cult films of the 1970s, with a soundtrack by Cat Stevens. Cort was nominated for the Golden Globe for best actor in a musical or comedy and for the BAFTA for most promising newcomer. The film was later placed 69th on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest love stories, and it influenced later outsider comedies such as Wes Anderson's Rushmore.

Wary of being typecast as an oddball, Cort turned down the role of Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and he had alienated Paramount by refusing to promote Harold and Maude until Ashby regained control of the edit. He worked mainly in theatre for several years, making his Broadway debut in Simon Gray's Wise Child, and returned to film in the Canadian drama Why Shoot the Teacher? (1977). He later said, "If I had it all to do over today, I probably would just shut up, take the money and not worry about it."

In 1979 a serious car crash on the Hollywood Freeway left him with a fractured skull, broken limbs and severe facial injuries. Surgeries and a failed lawsuit left him in debt, and he spent much of the 1980s in smaller film and television roles, including Bernard Marx in Brave New World (1980), Sigmund Freud in The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud (1984), the voice of the computer Edgar in Electric Dreams (1984), Invaders from Mars (1986), Bates Motel (1987), The Chocolate War (1988) and episodes of The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Darkside. In 1991 he directed, co-wrote and starred in Ted and Venus.

From the mid-1990s directors who loved Harold and Maude gave him memorable supporting parts: Michael Mann's Heat (1995), Kevin Smith's Dogma (1999) as God, But I'm a Cheerleader (1999), Pollock, Coyote Ugly and The Million Dollar Hotel (all 2000), and Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). On television he appeared in Arrested Development, Ugly Betty, Criminal Minds and Eagleheart. He also co-founded the L.A. Classic Theatre Works with Richard Dreyfuss and Rene Auberjonois. His last feature role was the voice of the King in The Little Prince (2015), and his final acting credit was the short film Affections (2016).

Cort had a distinctive voice that he used widely after his accident. He voiced Edgar, the jealous home computer, in Electric Dreams (1984), Josiah Wormwood in Batman: The Animated Series, and Winslow Schott, the Toyman, in Superman: The Animated Series, Static Shock and Justice League Unlimited. He also voiced characters in The Mask: Animated Series and The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries, and the King in the English-language version of The Little Prince (2015), which won the Cesar Award for best animated film. For radio he recorded a complete reading of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.

Cort never married and had no children. In the 1970s he lived for a time in the guest cottage of Groucho Marx's home in Bel Air, describing the comedian as his "fairy godfather", and he said Marx died in his arms in 1977. Friends included Roslyn Kind, whose wedding featured a song Cort co-wrote with songwriter Bruce Roberts, and Sally Kellerman, his Brewster McCloud co-star, who recalled telling him on their first day, "We're going to be best friends." He survived a second serious car accident in 2011. His family described him as a generous, loyal and mischievous son, brother, uncle and great-uncle who never missed a birthday and loved sending gifts "simply to say, 'I'm thinking of you.'" His nephew Peter Berkman is a member of the band Anamanaguchi.

Raised Catholic, Cort was given a Mass of Christian burial, and his family wrote that he had "returned peacefully to God's loving embrace". He spoke candidly about the double edge of Harold and Maude, calling his cult status both "a blessing and a curse" and admitting, "I've had my moments where I just cursed that movie and wished I'd never done it." He also said, "Actually, I'm only as weird as the parts I play, and most of the parts I've been offered have been pretty weird." He felt the film's success belonged to its audience, saying, "Truthfully, its success came from the people."

Cort was nominated for a Laurel Award as a male star of tomorrow for Brewster McCloud (1970). For Harold and Maude (1971) he was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for best actor in a motion picture musical or comedy and the BAFTA Award for most promising newcomer to leading film roles, and Salon reported that he won a French Crystal Star for the role. As part of the ensemble of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou he shared nominations from the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Boston Society of Film Critics for best cast, and the voice cast of The Little Prince received a Behind the Voice Actors award.

Harold and Maude made Cort, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, "a generational icon" and "a kind of midnight movie poster boy". The Guardian wrote that he "set the mould for mordant bedroom iconoclasts in successive generations of indie films, from Rushmore to Ghost World to Submarine." Jason Schwartzman, star of Wes Anderson's Rushmore, said, "Cort was the first actor that I ever felt close to," and Anderson later cast Cort in The Life Aquatic. Fans have long held Harold and Maude celebrations with sunflowers and yellow umbrellas, and the film remains a repertory favourite more than 50 years after its release.

Bud Cort died on Wednesday, 11 February 2026, at an assisted living facility in Norwalk, Connecticut, of complications from pneumonia after a long illness. He was 77. His death was reported by his longtime friend, producer Dorian Hannaway, and confirmed by his family to The New York Times. He was survived by his brother Joseph and sisters Kerry, Tracy and Shelly, and by nieces, nephews and great-nieces and great-nephews. The family received friends at the Graham Funeral Home in Rye on 19 February 2026, and a Mass of Christian burial was celebrated on 20 February. A memorial in Los Angeles was announced for a later date. His burial place has not been made public.