For many of us, “Harold and Maude” isn’t just a movie — it’s a rite of passage. It introduced an unlikely emotional grammar: a young man obsessed with death learns to dance with life from a woman decades older, and it taught us that the shape of our souls matters more than the shape of our lives. And it made Bud Cort’s screen identity one of the most indelible of the 20th century (you can be assured that this film will be screened at this year’s MEA Film Fest).
But there’s a poignant paradox here worth noting. A defining role — especially one as singular as Harold — can be both a blessing and a burden. For Cort it opened doors, accolades, and love, but it also risked reducing a complex actor with five decades of work to one brilliant archetype. That’s the double edge of iconic performance: it gives you durability in cultural memory, and it can quietly limit how audiences and industries imagine your range.
This isn’t just true for child actors. It’s also true for many of us in our lives and careers when we get pigeon-holed in our identity. I’ve experienced two role models this week, co-leading two MEA workshops with two icons who aren’t willing to be typecast in life. Heisman Trophy winner Ricky Williams shed his identity as a football great to pursue his calling of being a healer and evolutionary astrologer. Bestselling author Liz Gilbert shed her identity as a hetero heroine by falling in love with her butch BFF and writing a tell-all book about their painfully co-dependent romance. This from the lovely “Eat Pray Love” lady! Who would have guessed. Ricky (now known as Errick) and Liz are two of the most liberated people I know and I got to teach with both of them in the same week. What a blessing!
And in this moment of remembering Bud Cort, there’s also a subtle, unspoken truth: time keeps teaching us about mortality, but also about meaning. The actors who shaped our inner lives — especially those from films like “Harold and Maude” that insist we confront the interior mysteries — remind us that we, too, are aging. They remind us why we watch these films in the first place: to hold a mirror up to our own questions about life, love, death, and what it means to finally live.
Rest in peace, Bud Cort — and thank you for the reminder that the odd, the sincere, and the beautifully strange parts of ourselves are the ones worth celebrating.
-Chip