Mark Blum, a longtime Broadway actor whose film career got an early kickstart from an appearance in the Madonna hit “Desperately Seeking Susan,” has died of complications from COVID-19. He was 69.
Broadway World reported Blum’s death, with no further details.
Born May 14, 1950, in Newark, New Jersey, Blum was a widely respected performer on New York stages from the ’70s on. He won an Obie Award for “Gus and Al” in 1989, and appeared in such Broadway shows as “Lost in Yonkers” (1991), “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” (2012), and, most recently, in 2013’s “Assembled Parties.”
Judith Light, who worked with Blum on “Assembled Parties, wrote on Twitter:
Mark Blum, so generous, so kind, so humble,so talented. Our time together in the play The Assembled Parties at MTC was a true joy
May he rest in peace knowing that he transformed the lives of so many and was cherished by so many; me among them— JudithLight (@JudithLight) March 26, 2020
Blum made his film debut in the comedy “Lovesick” (1983) and his TV debut in the film “Things Are Looking Up” (1984).
In 1985, he starred as slimy yuppie hot tub salesman Gary Glass in the hit “Desperately Seeking Susan,” alongside Madonna, Rosanna Arquette, Aidan Quinn, Laurie Metcalf and a host of other up-and-comers. At a 2010 25th-anniversary celebration of the project, he said of the film, “I didn’t think it was gonna be iconic… but I will say that looking at it now, what seems special to me in watching it is that we were all young, y’know, but the movie is about possibilities. That’s what it seems to be about when I see it now. And we were, all of us, so right on the cusp of something in our lives, professionally, right at that point, and there was a kind of an alchemy between, I think, the energy of all those people who had so much energy and so much imagination intersecting with a movie that was about that right at the time in New York when New York was about to reinvent itself.”
Blum also appeared in such movies as “Crocodile Dundee” (1986), “Blind Date” (1987) and “Miami Rhapsody” (1995), and had extensive TV credits, among them guest spots on “St. Elsewhere” (1984), “Roseanne” (1992), “Frasier” (1997), and an upcoming episode of “Billions,” as well as being a regular on “Mozart in the Jungle” (2014-2018) and “You” (2018).
His co-star Julia Duffy remembered him on Twitter, writing, “RIP #markblum. Working with him was unlike anything I’d experienced before. I would have been happy to rehearse the play for a year, his work was so pure, and though funny, so haunting. I stood backstage to hear his curtain line every night.”
He is survived by his wife, actress Janet Zarish.