Trailer
Plot summary
Harold Chasen has money and an obsession with death. He stages fake suicides, attends the funerals of people he never met and drives a hearse. His mother, a self-obsessed socialite, wants him to be respectable, so she buys him a luxury car and arranges blind dates. At a stranger's funeral Mass Harold meets Maude, 79. She makes her home in a decommissioned railroad car, steals cars without a thought and digs up ailing street trees to replant them in the forest. She teaches Harold to play the banjo.
Cast
- Judy Englesas Candy Gulf
- Susan Madiganas Girlfriend
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Harold and Maude (1971)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Colin Higgins wrote the screenplay as a UCLA master's thesis and, while working as producer Edward Lewis's pool boy, got it to Lewis's wife Mildred, who was impressed enough to pass it on to Paramount's Stanley Jaffe.
- Author Danny Peary noted the film broke theatrical longevity records in Detroit and Montreal, and in Minneapolis residents picketed a theater to try to get it replaced after it ran there for three straight years.
- Hal Ashby felt the actress playing Maude should ideally be European, and his list of possibilities ran to Peggy Ashcroft, Edith Evans, Gladys Cooper, Celia Johnson, Lotte Lenya, Luise Rainer, Pola Negri, Minta Durfee and the novelist Agatha Christie.
- Higgins sold his script on the condition he would direct it, but studio heads rejected his test footage as unsatisfactory; Hal Ashby only agreed to take over as director after getting Higgins's blessing, and brought him on as co-producer.
- Cat Stevens got the job scoring the film only because Elton John, who had been considered for it, recommended him after dropping out of the project himself.
- In her later years on Martha's Vineyard, actress Ruth Gordon was honored by a local theater in Oak Bluffs that screened the film every June, sometimes with Gordon herself attending to answer audience questions.
