Bud Cort

Branded as Hollywood's preeminent manchild after playing misunderstood youths in Robert Altman's "Brewster McCloud" (1971) and Hal Ashby's "Harold and Maude" (1971), Bud Cort found it difficult to find steady work as an actor when the film industry homogenized mid-decade. Sidelined by traumatic injuries suffered in a 1979 automobile accident, the former mentee of Groucho Marx turned to character work at home and abroad. In addition to contributing memorable supporting roles to Amy Jones' "Love Letters" (1983), Andre Konchalovskiy's "Maria's Lovers" (1984) and Tobe Hooper's 1986 remake of the sci-fi classic "Invaders from Mars," Cort was called upon to play the occasional lead in such offbeat projects as "The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud" (1984) and "Bates Motel" (1987), a pilot for a proposed NBC series based on Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960). More than a decade after his film debut, one of the actor's more prominent film appearances found him shunted out of the frame entirely as the voice for a lovelorn computer pining for cellist Virginia Madsen in the CD-rom-com "Electric Dreams" (1984). Seen later in his career in diverse roles in Michael Mann's "Heat" (1995), Kevin Smith's "Dogma" (1999) and Wes Anderson's "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (2004), Cort proved himself to be the unlikeliest of Hollywood survivors and a rare juvenile performer able to transition successfully to mature roles.