‘World According to Garp’ actress and three-time Tony nominee Mary Beth Hurt dies aged 79

Mary Beth Hurt, the actress who starred in The World According to Garp, has passed away. She was seventy-nine years old. Hurt was a three-time Tony nominee whose Hollywood career went on for more than four decades.

She was first married to actor William Hurt. That marriage lasted from 1971 until they divorced in 1982. The next year, Mary Beth Hurt married filmmaker Paul Schrader, and the couple had two children together. She stayed with Schrader until her death.

Hurt, who was born as Mary Beth Supinger, worked with director Martin Scorsese on The Age of Innocence and Bringing Out the Dead. She also appeared in films her husband, Paul Schrader, directed, like Light Sleeper in 1992 and Affliction in 1997.

Her death was shared on Facebook by Paul Schrader and their daughter, Molly. As per Variety, the announcement read:

"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. Although we're all grieving there is some comfort in knowing she is no longer suffering and reunited with her sisters in peace."

Mary Beth Hurt passed away at an assisted living facility:

As per a report shared by The Hollywood Reporter, Mary Beth Hurt spent her final days at an assisted living facility in Jersey City. She got an Alzheimer's diagnosis back in 2015. Before moving to Jersey City, Hurt stayed at a facility in Manhattan where Paul Schrader had his own apartment in the same building.

Hurt took the Broadway stage fifteen times during her career, starting in 1974 and ending in 2011. She got a Tony nomination in 1982 for playing Meg Magrath in Crimes of the Heart. The Beth Henley play told the story of three Mississippi sisters going through trauma. Jessica Lange played the same character in the movie that came out in 1986, which also had Diane Keaton and Sissy Spacek. Bruce Beresford directed that film.

David Hare worked with Mary Beth Hurt when he directed The Secret Rapture on Broadway in 1989. He wrote about her acting for The New York Times that year and had nothing but praise for her skills.

"The first thing, above all, is that she is a fine ensemble actress, she has the best of the English and the best of the American traditions," said Hare.

"What marks English actors is that they can turn on a sixpence — there isn't anything technically they can't do. They're supple, like musicians, and from the technical facility they acquire freedom. And in Mary Beth's case, there is a sort of improvisatory gift, a willingness to make the performance fresh every time," he added.

Mary Beth Hurt preferred playing secondary roles over lead characters:

As per the report shared by The Hollywood Reporter, Mary Beth Hurt never chased after leading roles and purposely stuck with supporting parts. In 2010, she sat down for an interview where she explained her thinking.

"I've never been extremely comfortable playing the lead," she said.

"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," she explained.

"I never felt very beautiful, or incredibly smart or witty, so I was always looking for something about [roles] that intrigued me. And I would sort of twist that character in a way because I remember thinking that an ingénue character doesn't ever think they're an ingénue. They think they're a person, and they have idiosyncrasies. Those idiosyncrasies interested me," she continued.

Marshalltown, Iowa, is where Mary Beth Hurt grew up. Forrest, her father, served in the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant during World War II. Dolores, her mother, took her daughters to see plays in Des Moines. Mary Beth Hurt discovered her calling in eighth grade after watching a high school play.

"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," she said.

Before Jean Seberg became famous for Otto Preminger's Saint Joan and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, she babysat Mary Beth Hurt's family in Iowa.

"She was just a neighborhood kid," Hurt recalled.

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"We lived on Summit Street, which was between 6th and 7th. And the Sebergs lived on 6th Street. Her father was a pharmacist and my grandfather was a pharmacist, so the families had known each other for a while."

The Iowa connection between Hurt and Seberg showed how small-town roots launched two women into Hollywood careers that took very different paths.

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