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They were two very different actors who found critical and commercial success before they were old enough to legally drink. One used his deadpan demeanor and hangdog expression to specialize in oddball roles with some of film’s top independent directors. The other worked hard to overcome his early “teen heartthrob” stereotype. Now it’s the coincidence of them both passing away on February 11 at ages 77 and 48, however, that will forever link Bud Cort and James Van Der Beek.
Born Walter Edward Cox in Rye, New York, in 1948, Bud (a childhood nickname) took acting lessons as a teen from William Hickey. His stage surname came from a spelling of his mother’s maiden name. Failing to get into NYU as a drama major, Cort was accepted in the art department but continued to pursue acting. His first movie role was an uncredited bit part in the 1967 high school drama Up the Down Staircase.
It was while he was performing stand-up comedy in New York that Bud caught the eye of director Robert Altman, who cast him as an Army hospital staffer in Altman’s groundbreaking 1970 Korean War send-up M*A*S*H. The pair reunited later that year for the surreal Brewster McCloud, with Cort in the title role of an outcast living inside the Houston Astrodome who dreams of flying like a bird. He also appeared alongside Stacy Keach in the offbeat western The Traveling Executioner and in “B” auteur Roger Corman’s apocalyptic satire Gas-s-s-s.
Based on his work with Altman, Cort was tapped by director Hal Ashby for the role he was best known for, death-obsessed teen Harold Parker Chasen, in 1971’s Harold and Maude. Forming an unlikely bond and unlikelier romance with eccentric septuagenarian Maude Chardin (Ruth Gordon), Harold learns to appreciate life and escape his dictatorial family. While the dark comedy received decidedly mixed reviews (Variety said it “has all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage”), it went on to earn a devoted cult following thanks to college screenings and midnight showings.
The 1970s also found Cort in such films as the Canadian seriocomedy Why Shoot the Teacher (1977) and the bizarre Son of Hitler (1978). In 1979 the actor was nearly killed in a Los Angeles car crash, with facial injuries that required extensive (and expensive) plastic surgeries and put his career on hold for a extended period. One role he finished prior to the accident was in a 1980 TV mini-series of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In 1984 He would play the title role in The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud and voiced a computer who is part of a love triangle along with its owner and a beautiful neighbor in Electric Dreams. Bud was his usual quirky self as the new owner of the infamous Bates Motel, in a failed 1987 pilot of the same name, and he co-wrote, directed, and starred in 1991’s Ted & Venus.
Cort’s later work included an uncredited turn as a restaurant manager in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) and as an incarnation of God in Kevin Smith’s taboo-busting Dogma (1999), plus 2000s appearances in Coyote Ugly, Pollock, and The Number 23. He was “bond company stooge”/kidnap victim Bill Ubell in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). On the small screen, he voiced Superman villain Toyman in Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited, and could be seen in episodes of Arrested Development, Ugly Betty, and Criminal Minds. His last feature film credit was the voice of The King in a 2015 animated version of The Little Prince. After spending the last several years battling what was called “a long illness,” Cort died of complications from pneumonia at an assisted living home in Connecticut. When an interviewer once asked him how he separated his personal and professional lives, Bud matter-of-factly replied, “It’s the same thing.”
Like Bud Cort, James Van Der Beek caught the acting bug while he was a teenager. Born in central Connecticut in 1977, James coaxed his parents into letting him take up a stage career and made his off-Broadway debut when he was just 16, in Edward Albee’s Finding the Sun. His first TV appearance was on the Nickelodeon series Clarissa Explains It All, followed by three episodes of As The World Turns, and in 1995 Van Der Beek got his first film role as a high school bully in the coming-of-age comedy Angus. 1995 also found him attending New Jersey’s Drew University. After two years he dropped out, though, when he landed the role that would make him a household name, pensive adolescent and would-be filmmaker Dawson Leery in the 1998-2003 teen drama Dawson’s Creek.
One of a string of youth-targeted series on the fledgling WB network, Dawson’s Creek won over audiences and many critics with its down-to-earth, thoughtful storylines and a fine ensemble cast that, along with Van Der Beek, included Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson, and Michelle Williams. 1999 found James back on the big screen as the backup quarterback on a small-town high school football team in Texas in the acclaimed sports drama Varsity Blues. He stayed in the Lone Star State to play a newly-recruited lawman out to avenge his family’s murders in the 2001 frontier actioner Texas Rangers. James found time to spoof his Dawson role in the original Scary Movie (2000) and played himself in Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), while he took part in some sordid extracurricular activities in the college-set drama The Rules of Attraction (2002).
After Dawson’s Creek ran dry in 2003, James returned to the off-Broadway stage in Lanford Wilson’s Manhattan Project drama Rain Dance. He also appeared in such films as The Plague (2006), Formosa Betrayed (2009), Stolen (also ’09), Labor Day (2013), and Downsizing (2017). Meanwhile, he remained a familiar small-screen presence with recurring roles on One Tree Hill, How I Met Your Mother, Mercy, and (playing a satirical version of himself) Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt 23. Van Der Beek even took up the reality TV habit, turning up on Dancing with the Stars, The Masked Singer, and The Real Full Monty. His last, posthumous TV role will be later this year, as Dean Wilson in the streaming series Elle, a prequel to Legally Blonde.
Diagnosed with Stage 3 colorectal cancer in 2023, Van Der Beek made his condition public a year later and worked to increase awareness of the disease and the need for testing. In 2025 he held an auction of memorabilia from his films and TV shows in order to raise funds for his medical treatments. The actor passed away at home in Texas, leaving behind second wife Kimberly Brook and their six children.