Bud Cort, Who Starred in 1971's 'Harold and Maude,' Dies at 77

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/movies/bud-cort-dead.html



Bud Cort, Who Starred in 1971’s ‘Harold and Maude,’ Dies at 77

The role, one of his first, made him a household name and a film idol of the anti-establishment 1970s. But it also limited his growth as an actor.


Bud Cort, a veteran stage and screen actor whose best-known role was one of his first, playing a death-obsessed, 19-year-old recluse named Harold opposite Ruth Gordon’s 79-year-old, happy-go-lucky Holocaust survivor named Maude in the 1971 off-kilter romantic comedy “Harold and Maude,” died on Wednesday in Norwalk, Conn. He was 77.

A representative for his family said that the death, at an assisted-living facility, was from complications from pneumonia.

Mr. Cort appeared in more than 40 movies, dozens of TV shows and countless theater productions, but even late in life he was often recognized on the street for a single role: that of Harold Chasen, a precocious, morose rich teenager who falls into friendship, and then love, with Maude Chardin, who lives in an abandoned railroad car and is old enough to be his grandmother.

The film, directed by Hal Ashby, is by turns humorous, touching and melancholic; late in the film, Harold sees a tattoo on Maude’s arm, left over from her time in a Nazi concentration camp.