CDA: Mary Beth Hurt
- ladiesvoices
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
I was saddened to get a text from my brother Howard alerting me to the death of Mary Beth Hurt. She was a wonderful young character actress at her peak in the 70s and 80s.
I immediately thought of her in Woody Allen's first drama, Interiors (1978), and a creepy little dark comedy called Parents (1989). I just looked it up, that movie was directed by Bob Freaking Balaban! No wonder it's so weird.
Interiors was her first movie, Allen had seen her in a play in New York. Here's a scene with her, Geraldine Page (playing her mother), and Sam Waterston (playing her boyfriend). Funny watching this scene it doesn't make me think of the Ingmar Bergman movies Allen was copying, it makes me think of Hannah and Her Sisters, his more refined Bergman regurgitation from the 80s. It's like in Hannah he had processed Bergman and turned it into his own brand.
Howard reminded me she was in Garp (1982) and told me about a Joan Micklin Silver movie I didn't know, Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979). And I remember her fondly in The Age of Innocence (1993). You might have heard that they gave out the first Oscar for Best Casting this year - - the best casting Oscar should have gone to The Age of Innocence, that movie is LITTERED with amazing actors in very small parts, all of them grabbing their moment and making the most of it. They all wanted to be in a costume drama directed by Martin Scorcese, can you blame them? Jeez, I need to watch that movie again.
I knew the Hurt part of her name came from her first husband, William Hurt. I had forgotten that she was married to the amazing screenwriter and director Paul Schraeder. Since 1983, until she died! The more I read about him the less I want to know so I wonder if she was also a total weirdo.
I read something amazing in her New York Times obit: she grew up in Marshalltown, Iowa (population approx. 20,000 at the time) and one of her babysitters was the great off-kilter American actor Jean Seberg. Hurt was the voice of Seberg in a 1995 documentary, From the Journals of Jean Seberg. I've put THAT on hold at the public library...
Here's the trailer for The World According to Garp, she played Garp's girlfriend and eventual wife. I'm not shocked that we saw full frontal of a baby in the movie but I was not prepared to see a dingle dangle in the PREVIEW.
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