Mary Beth Hurt, a storied actress on screen and stage, known for her performances in “Interiors” and “The World According to Garp,” has died. She was 79.
Hurt died Saturday, March 28, according to separate posts on social media shared by her husband, director Paul Schrader, and their daughter, Molly. She died in an assisted living facility from Alzheimer’s disease, which she battled for several years.
USA TODAY has reached out to Hurt’s reps for comment.
“Yesterday morning we lost my mom, Mary Beth, to Alzheimer’s after a decade long battle with the disease. She was an actress, a wife, a sister, a mother, an aunt, a friend, and she took on all those roles [sic] with grace and a kind ferocity,” Molly wrote in a post to Instagram March 30. “Although we’re grieving there is some comfort in knowing she is no longer suffering and is reunited with her sisters in peace.”
On Facebook, Schrader, known for his work on films like “Taxi Driver” and “American Gigolo,” mourned his wife’s death with a message about his own father.
“My father kept a meticulous and finely printed daily journal. On Thanksgiving 1978 he wrote simply ‘Joan died 12:20 am.’ Nothing more. Joan was his wife and my mother,” Schrader wore. “He was made of stern stuff. I’ve looked at this entry over the years and wondered how I’d feel in his place. Now I’m in that place.”
Hurt, who starred in a series of major films from the late ’70s to mid ’90s, was nominated for three Tony Awards as well as a BAFTA and Independent Spirit Award. She worked with Schrader on 1992’s “Light Sleeper” and 1997’s “Affliction.”
She made her film debut in the 1978 Woody Allen flick “Interiors,” in which she played one of several siblings dealing with family dysfunction. Diane Keaton also appeared in the film, during which Hurt recalled being “nervous” amid production.
“I remember the first day of shooting I was so nervous,” she told The New York Times in 1986. “But I looked down and saw that Keaton’s knees were shaking — and I immediately became calm. I thought, ‘It’s all right, everyone gets nervous.'”
Piggybacking off the visibility brought by the role, she starred in “The World According to Garp” as Helen Holm Garp, then in Martin Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence.” Etched in Hollywood memory as a supporting actress, she was as known for her screen acting as her work on stage, appearing in over a dozen theatrical productions over the course of her career, including the Broadway plays “Trelawny of the ‘Wells,'” and “Crimes of the Heart.”