Oscar Profile #360: Holly Hunter

Born March 20, 1958 in Conyers, Georgia to Opal, a homemaker, and Charles Hunter, a part-time sporting goods company representative and farmer with a 250-acre farm, Holly Hunter was the youngest of seven siblings.

Hunter’s parents encouraged her acting talent from an early age. Her first on-stage role was in a fifth-grade play in which she portrayed Helen Keller. After graduating high school, she went to Pittsburgh to pursue a degree in drama from Carnegie Mellon University. After her graduation in 1980, she moved to Manhattan where she met playwright Beth Henley in a stalled elevator on upper Broadway. That meeting led to her being cast as a replacement for Mary Beth Hurt in Henley’s Crimes of the Heart and then in the starring role in her Miss Firecracker.

Having made her film debut in a one-line role in 1981’s The Burning, her film career was slow to get going. In 1984, she was offered the female lead in the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple, but had to decline since she was committed to another play. She recommended her roommate, Frances McDormand, who not only got the role but her future husband, Joel Coen, out of the deal. Hunter’s own breakthrough role was in 1987’s Raising Arizona in a role the Coen Brothers wrote specifically for her. She emerged as a genuine star when she replaced a pregnant Debra Winger in the same year’s Broadcast News, for which she received her first Oscar nomination. Two years later she won an Emmy for TV’s Roe vs. Wade and three years after that won another one for The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom.

1993 was truly Hunter’s year. Although her screen career had flourished since Broadcast News, nothing on the big screen equaled that impact until The Piano for which she won an Oscar for Best Actress, while at the same time being nominated for Best Supporting Actress for The Firm.

In 1995, Hunter married Polish born cinematographer Janusz Kaminski who had won an Oscar for Schindler’s List the same year she won hers for The Piano. During their marriage, which ended in 2001, he would win a second Oscar for 1998’s Saving Private Ryan. Her best-known role during this period was as Billie Jean King in the 2001TV movie, When Billie Beat Bobby for which she received another Emmy nomination.

Hunter’s role in 2003’s Thirteen earned her a fourth Oscar nomination. In a relationship with actor Gordon McDonald since 2001, the actress gave birth to twin sons Press and Claude McDonald on January 17, 2006 at the age of 47. From 2007-2010, she was the star of the highly successful TV series, Saving Grace, for which she was nominated for yet another Emmy.

Seen mostly on TV throughout her career, Hunter had her biggest big screen role in years in 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and an even bigger role in 2017’s The Big Sick. She remains one of our most interesting actresses in her sixtieth year.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

BROADCAST NEWS (1987), directed by James L. Brooks

Hunter had been around in small roles since the early 80s, but burst into the public consciousness in 1987 with her back-to-back starring roles in the Coen Brothers’ comedy classic, Raising Arizona and this send-up of the television newspaper business from the creator of The Mary Tyler Moore Show which defined the genre throughout the 1970s. Hunter was a last-minute replacement for Debra Winger, but more than held her own against veteran stars William Hurt, Albert Brooks and Jack Nicholson. The film earned seven richly deserved Oscar nominations including one each for Hunter, Hurt and Brooks.

THE PIANO (1903), directed by Jane Campion

Hunter’s trademark Southern accent was the only thing missing from her incisive portrayal of the 1850s widowed mute Scottish woman who travels to New Zealand with her daughter (Anna Paquin) and prized piano to marry frontiersman Sam Neill, a marriage she was sold into by her father. In a fit of pique, he sells her piano to hot-blooded neighbor Harvey Keitel who exacts a physical relationship on her in exchange for piano lessons. Hunter’s highly accomplished piano playing was her own in Campion’s feminist manifesto which won a slew of international awards including Oscars for both Hunter and Paquin.

THE FIRM (1993), directed by Sydney Pollack

John Grisham’s best-seller was the first of his so far ten novels to be filmed. Its built-in audience was a guaranteed hitmaker for Pollack who hadn’t had a hit since 1985’s Out of Africa and star Tom Cruise in one of his best roles sandwiched between A Few Good Men and Interview with the Vampire. Hunter is a riot in her supporting turn as a helpful secretary, which earned her the rare distinction of being nominated in two acting categories in the same year, a feat shared with Emma Thompson, also nominated in two roles that year for The Remains of the Day and In the Name of the Father.

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS (1995), directed by Jodie Foster

Foster’s second film as a director should have been a major success following her well-regarded debut with 1991’s Little Man Tate. It had a great cast, headed by Hunter, Robert Downey, Jr., Anne Bancroft, Charles Durning, Dylan McDermott, Geraldine Chaplin, Steve Guttenberg, Cynthia Stephenson and Claire Danes in a film about a Thanksgiving family reunion. The problem was that nothing worked. The characters were all obnoxious and the story itself had nowhere to go. Hunter was particularly grating with her tics and mugging. It was a film that sadly set the careers of all involved back, some for decades.

THE BIG SICK (2017), directed by Michael Showalter

After years of doing outstanding work on TV, with not much in the way of theatrical splendor, Hunter has a big screen role that fits her like a glove. The film, co-written by Emily Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani, is about the married couple’s courting days when they were struggling stand-up comics in Chicago, he from a strict Muslim Pakistani family and she from the unconventional relationship between southerner Hunter and New Yorker Ray Romano. The film, which is initially cute at best, becomes something more with the arrival of Hunter and Romano whose perfect timing makes it very special. Hunter is wonderfully moving and funny at the same time.