Bud Cort

In 1979, Cort was involved in a terrible car accident on the Hollywood Freeway on his way back from a Frank Sinatra concert. He broke an arm and a leg and sustained a concussion and a fractured skull. His face was severely lacerated, his lower lip cut and hanging by a thread. In 1984, he told People magazine, "When I got up the nerve to look at myself in a mirror for the first time, I screamed. I looked like a monster, with my forehead, face and lip all sewn up. I wanted to die." Cort underwent three operations for plastic surgery and remains unsatisfied with the result. "I try not to look in mirrors," he said.

At the time, Cort had a part lined up in a Robby Benson movie, "Die Laughing." He expected to be fired but instead, producer Jon Peters said, "Well, you're playing the villain anyway. Think about how good it will be for the character." Later, Leonard Maltin wrote, "Cort is disgustingly oily as a fascist villain."

Cort spent all of his savings on medical bills and went on to lose a $10 million suit he had brought against the driver of the other car. He found himself broke and without work. While he receives annual residual checks from Paramount for "Harold and Maude," (the last one was for $28.77 ), he doesn't get any profit from video distribution. "I get no participation from video sales -- I'd be a millionaire if I did," Cort has said. "I made next to nothing from that movie."

In the past 20 years, Cort has made 30 forgettable films, including playing the role of Norman Bates' creepy proxy in the TV flick "The Bates Motel." After the accident, he'd stopped being choosy and uninterested in weirdo roles. His disfigurement motivated him to go into radio, where he did a bit of voice work, including a successfully syndicated reading of "The Catcher in the Rye."

In 1991, he made his debut as a director with "Ted & Venus" a low-budget romance about a crazed poet on Venice Beach that he also wrote and starred in. While the film's producer called the movie the "spiritual sequel" of "Harold and Maude," the critics were not moved. The L.A. Times wrote, "Bud Cort was as appealing in the milestone comedy ('Harold and Maude') as he is repellent in this film." Variety's Todd McCarthy called it "a highly unpleasant yarn about a lovelorn sickie who endlessly torments a beautiful young woman." The film -- with cameos by Woody Harrelson, Gena Rowlands, Andrea Martin, Timothy Leary, Carol Kane and Martin Mull, went straight to video.

In the coming year, Cort will appear in four or five films, some of which already have pretty good street cred. He has a role in the highly controversial, much anticipated "Dogma," Kevin Smith's religious satire starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, with Alanis Morissette as God. And he will portray the strait-laced dad of Natasha Lyonne's high school cheerleader in "But I'm a Cheerleader." In the film, the girl is sent by her parents to rehab camp when it's suspected that she's a lesbian. He will also appear in Dwight Yoakam's western "South of Heaven, West of Hell," starring Vince Vaughn, Billy Bob Thornton and Paul Rubens. Further, Cort will be seen in Ed Harris' bio-pic about Jackson Pollack and the Bono-scripted "Million Dollar Hotel," about a murder at a skid-row hotel.

Cort may ultimately crack his typecast. Indeed, a new generation of kids is growing up that has never heard of "Harold and Maude." But for many a poetic soul, "Harold and Maude" is bound to stay around forever. As Colin Higgins once explained, "We're all Harold, and we all want to be Maude. We're all repressed and trying to be free, to be ourselves, to be vitally interested in living, to be everything we want."

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