Hurt died Saturday at assisted living facility in Jersey City, New Jersey, her husband, Oscar-nominated writer and director Paul Schrader, said. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2015, she had until recently lived in another facility in Manhattan, with her husband in another apartment in the building.

And in Six Degrees of Separation (1993), Hurt played one of New York socialites who falls into the web of deceit created by a charismatic man (Will Smith) pretending to be Sidney Poitier’s the son.

“The first thing, above all, is that she is a fine ensemble actress,” said playwright David Hare, who directed Hurt on Broadway in 1989’s The Secret Rapture and praised her in The New York Times in 1989. “She has the best of the English and the best of the American traditions.

Her first husband was Oscar-winning actor William Hurt; they married in 1971, separated in 1978 and divorced in 1982.

Woody Allen’s Interiors

Though it was Hurt’s first feature, she held her own in a powerhouse cast that included E.G. Marshall, Maureen Stapleton, Sam Waterston and Richard Jordan.

“Miss Hurt is very appealing as the youngest daughter who hates her mother and, thus, goes out of her way to convince herself she doesn’t,” Canby wrote in The New York Times.

In Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), directed by Joan Micklin Silver, she played the emotionally unavailable romantic obsession of John Heard’s character. And in by George Roy Hill’s The World According to Garp (1982), she took on the pivotal role of Helen Holm, a smart, fiercely independent woman who catches T.S. Garp’s (Robin Williams) eye, marries him, betrays his trust and ultimately becomes a passionate defender of his legacy.

Hurt rarely enjoyed top billing during her career. “I’ve never been extremely comfortable playing the lead,” she said in 2010 interview. “I don’t like the responsibility; there’s a feeling that I have to be good. Besides, I found secondary parts much more interesting, especially when I was younger and the ingénue roles were pretty bland.

“I never felt very beautiful, or incredibly smart or witty, so I was always looking for something about roles that intrigued me. I would sort of twist that character in a way because I remember thinking that an ingénue character doesn’t ever think they’re an ingénue. They think they’re a person, and they have idiosyncrasies, which interested me.”

“It wasn’t until I saw a play at our high school — in the eighth grade — that I realized that it was something you could do,” she said.

Before she starred in Preminger’s Saint Joan (1957) and Godard’s Breathless (1960), Jean Seberg was her babysitter.

“She was just a neighborhood kid,” Hurt said. “We lived on Summit Street, which was between 6th and 7th. And the Sebergs lived on 6th Street. Her father was a pharmacist and my grandfather was a pharmacist, so the families had known each other for a while.”

At Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, she played Celia in a 1973 production of As You Like It. Her other efforts with the company included roles in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Othello, One Shoe Off and More Than You Deserve before she made her Broadway debut in 1974 as Miss Prue in aHalPrince’s revival of Love for Love.

Hurt’s first Tony nom came in 1976 for her turn in a revival of the comedy Trelawny of the Wells. Among those sharing the stage were John Lithgow, Mandy Patinkin, Jeffrey Jones, Christopher Hewett, Michael Tucker and, in her Broadway debut, Meryl Streep.

Her third Tony nomination in 1986 was for the Michael Frayn drama Benefactors, about an architect’s attempts to revitalize run-down London neighborhood. It gave Hurt chance to work with longtime friend Glenn Close (the two first met on Love for Love andstarred opposite each other in The World According to Garp) and Waterston, who played her love interest in Interiors.

She and Schrader married in August 1983 in Chicago, and she appeared in 4 films directed by him: Light Sleeper (1992), Affliction (1997), The Walker (2007), Adam Resurrected (2008).

She also worked on the big screen in A Change of Seasons (1980), Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993), D.A.R.Y.L. (1985), the Schrader-penned Bringing Out the Dead (1999), The Family Man (2000), M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water (2006), The Dead Girl (2006), Untraceable (2008), Change in the Air (2018).

In the 1989 Times piece, Hurt said: ​​“I try not to think about the play, or the part, until I start rehearsals, and then I just try everything that comes to mind, until one thing makes sense.

“You may say, ‘Oh, she’s very selfish,’ and so you add that to the character. And then maybe a few weeks later you say, ‘She’s selfish, but she’s well intentioned,’ which tempers the selfishness. It’s just a process of addition and subtraction.”