lit a candle 3h ago"I found secondary parts much more interesting." That one line explains every performance she gave.
Their story
Mary Beth Hurt was an American actress of stage and screen whose quiet, precise and often unexpected performances made her one of the most respected supporting players of her generation. A three-time Tony Award nominee, she originated the role of Meg Magrath in Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, made…
Mary Beth Hurt was an American actress of stage and screen whose quiet, precise and often unexpected performances made her one of the most respected supporting players of her generation. A three-time Tony Award nominee, she originated the role of Meg Magrath in Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, made her film debut as the restless middle sister Joey in Woody Allen's Interiors (1978), and played Helen Holm, the wife of Robin Williams's T.S. Garp, in The World According to Garp (1982). She died on March 28, 2026, at an assisted-living facility in Jersey City, New Jersey, at the age of 79, after living with Alzheimer's disease for more than a decade.
She was born Mary Beth Supinger on September 26, 1946, in Marshalltown, Iowa, the daughter of Delores Lenore (née Andre) and Forrest Clayton Supinger, who had served as an officer during World War II. She grew up with two sisters, Andrea and Emily, in a large yellow house on Summit Street. One of her babysitters was a neighborhood teenager named Jean Seberg, who went on to film stardom. Her mother took the girls to see plays in Des Moines, but it was a play at her own school, when she was around the eighth grade, that made her realize acting was something a person could actually do. At Marshalltown High School, from which she graduated in 1964, she played a lead in Arsenic and Old Lace and won the drama award that Seberg had established for the school.
She studied drama at the University of Iowa, where she was a member of Mortar Board, and then entered the graduate acting program at New York University's School of the Arts (now Tisch) in 1969. There she met fellow student William Hurt. They married in 1971 on the lawn of her grandmother Opal Andre's home in Marshalltown, and spent a year in London, where she performed with the Questors theatre company in Ealing.
Back in New York she worked for Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival, playing Celia in As You Like It and appearing in Pericles, Othello and the rock musical More Than You Deserve, in which she played, of all things, a 98-year-old Vietnamese man. She made her Broadway debut in 1974 as Miss Prue in Harold Prince's revival of Love for Love, where she met her lifelong friend Glenn Close, and won a Clarence Derwent Award. Her first Tony nomination came in 1976 for Trelawny of the "Wells", a cast that also included a debuting Meryl Streep. Over the next four decades she appeared on Broadway 15 times, earning a second Tony nomination and an Obie Award for Crimes of the Heart (1981 to 1982) and a third Tony nomination for Michael Frayn's Benefactors (1986). Later stage work included David Hare's The Secret Rapture, Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls and, in 2011, a final Broadway turn as the Head Nun in The House of Blue Leaves.
On screen, Interiors earned her a BAFTA nomination for most promising newcomer. She followed it with Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), A Change of Seasons (1980) and The World According to Garp, then built a long run of distinctive character parts: the suspected cannibal mother in Parents (1989), a gallery owner in Slaves of New York (1989), Regina Beaufort in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993), a Manhattan socialite in Six Degrees of Separation (1993), and roles in D.A.R.Y.L., Bringing Out the Dead, The Family Man, Lady in the Water, Untraceable and Young Adult. She voiced Jean Seberg in Mark Rappaport's From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995) and received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for The Dead Girl (2006). Her last film was Change in the Air (2018).
She divorced William Hurt in 1982 and in August 1983 married the writer and director Paul Schrader in Chicago. They had two children, Molly and Sam, and she appeared in four films he directed: Light Sleeper (1992), Affliction (1997), The Walker (2007) and Adam Resurrected (2008). She rarely sought top billing and said she found secondary parts more interesting than ingenue leads.
Hurt was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2015. Schrader became her primary caretaker, and in February 2023 he said publicly that she had moved into memory care; he took an apartment in the same Manhattan facility to stay near her. She had recently moved to a facility in Jersey City when she died on Saturday, March 28, 2026. Her daughter announced the death on Instagram, writing that her mother had taken on every role in life "with grace and a kind ferocity." Broadway dimmed its marquees for her, among others, on June 9, 2026, and her image remains on display at the Orpheum Theatre in her hometown of Marshalltown.
Biography adapted from The Hollywood Reporter (March 29, 2026); The Guardian obituary (April 4, 2026); Times Republican, Marshalltown (April 4, 2026); AP; Deadline; USA Today; Wikipedia. Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“I've never been extremely comfortable playing the lead. 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.”
2010 interview, quoted by The Hollywood Reporter
“I never felt very beautiful, or incredibly smart or witty, so I was always looking for something about [roles] that intrigued me.”
2010 interview, quoted by The Hollywood Reporter
“I try not to think about the play, or the part, until I start rehearsals. And then I just try everything that comes to mind, until one thing makes sense.”
The New York Times, 1989
“She was just a neighborhood kid.”
On her childhood babysitter Jean Seberg
“It wasn't until I saw a play at our high school, I must have been in the eighth grade, that I realized that it was something you could do.”
On discovering acting, quoted by The Hollywood Reporter
“I've never been cast as a mistress. I'm the girl men marry, not the girl they have affairs with.”
On her role in The World According to Garp, quoted in The Guardian obituary
“She was an actress, a wife, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a friend, and she took on all those roles with grace and a kind ferocity.”
Daughter Molly Schrader on Instagram, March 2026
Photos
1Mary Beth Hurt at Barnes & Noble, New York, July 2013
Jul 2013 · by People Forever
From social media
4Posts by Mary Beth, and posts about them, kept here so they are not lost.