Mary Beth Hurt obituary

The thoughtful, understated actor Mary Beth Hurt, who has died aged 79, enjoyed the good fortune of seeing her early career intersect with an unusually intellectual moment in American cinema. She earned a Bafta nomination as one of the three sisters in Woody Allen’s Chekhov-via-Bergman experiment Interiors (1978) before causing onscreen havoc as Robin Williams’s frisky college professor wife in the John Irving adaptation The World According to Garp (1982). In Interiors, Hurt – making her movie debut – was cast as the directionless Joey, who belatedly achieves a kind of purpose in attempting to save her overbearing mother (Geraldine Page) from drowning. By far Allen’s gloomiest vision, the film nevertheless made $10m off a $3m budget, while Hurt did more than tread water in illustrious company. Though she lost out in Bafta’s most promising newcomer category to Christopher Reeve as Superman, the film’s minor-key success prefigured Hurt’s four-decade big-screen career. There were early missteps. Hurt beat Jamie Lee Curtis to the female lead in Joan Micklin Silver’s Head Over Heels (1979) – in which she played the married woman beguiling a civil servant (John Heard) – but the film suffered from studio jitters and an enforced happy ending. “Mr Heard and Miss Hurt are two of our best young actors,” sighed the New York Times’s Vincent Canby, “but the material is either thin and unfocused or rich and besides the point.” Worse was to follow with the marital melodrama A Change of Seasons (1980), in which Shirley MacLaine, Anthony Hopkins and Bo Derek formed an altogether unlikely love triangle. Hurt, cast as MacLaine and Hopkins’s daughter, had a ringside seat as her onscreen parents rowed on set; Derek, meanwhile, fell out with the original director Noel Black, who was fired and replaced with Richard Lang. Even reshoots featuring Hopkins and Derek romping in a hot tub did little to tempt cinemagoers. The World According to Garp, then, appeared to be a lifeline. Hurt’s cha…