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While doing stand-up at Upstairs at the Downstairs, he was discovered by Robert Altman and cast as Pvt. Boone in the 1970 smash "M*A*S*H." Next, Altman cast Cort in the title role of the black comedy/fantasy "Brewster McCloud," about an owlish egghead who dreams of flying through the Houston Astrodome. Having proven that he could do quirky and black, Cort was then cast as an angelic ghoul, a troubled rich kid, in "Harold and Maude."

The movie started out as a half-hour master's thesis when then-31-year old Colin Higgins was attending UCLA. But it would develop into a substantive film of surprising philosophical and political scope. Wiser than merely an eccentric dark comedy that kindles rebellious, daisy-tossing joie de vivre, the movie is also an impeccably subtle (actually unspoken) exploration of the legacy of the Holocaust. In one succinct shot, the camera focuses on Maude's tattoo keepsake from World War II -- a fleeting and unequivocal clue to her grab-life-by-the-balls personality.

Unfortunately, the critics never got it. Nor were they amused, and the film flopped at the box office and closed quickly. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby grumped, "You might well want to miss Hal Ashby's 'Harold and Maude.'" Variety called it a "tasteless offbeat comedy [that] has all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage." Meanwhile, Film Quarterly wrote that the film is "one of the best movies to come out of Hollywood in years. It is a love story, a sentimental black comedy, a ludicrous tear-jerker, a grisly social satire."

Eventually, "Harold and Maude" would play for two years in Paris, where Cort won a Crystal Star (the French equivalent of the Academy Award.) In college towns and art houses, the film found a devoted audience among disaffected youth. While the wild ones would watch "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" ad infinitum, the sensitive ones watched "Harold and Maude" again and again. One zealot claims to have seen it 201 times. "Harolding" became part of the teen lexicon: A term morose mopes coined to describe their penchant for cemetery-dwelling. Eventually, after 12 years, the film turned a profit. Meanwhile, Cort braved his cult status, with fervent fans leaving tombstones and pictures of dead babies' graves at his door.

Wary of being typecast, he turned his attention toward the theater, making his Broadway debut in Simon Grey's "Wise Child." He also did Chekhov, Ionesco and Beckett. Most recently he garnered accolades as a disillusioned circus clown in "He Who Gets Slapped," an adaptation of Russian playwright Leonid Andreyev's tragicomedy.

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