Oscar Profile #405: Kim Hunter

Born November 12, 1922 in Detroit, Michigan to an engineer and his wife, a former concert pianist, Janet Cole was a painfully shy child who studied drama to overcome her shyness.

The actress made her stage debut as Penny in Penny Wise in Miami in 1939. She was discovered by an RKO talent agent in a 1942 Pasadena Playhouse production of Arsenic and Old Lace and given a seven-year contract by David O. Selznick where her named was changed to Kim Hunter. She made her screen debut in a starring role in 1943’s horror classic, The Seventh Victim followed by a featured role in 1944’s Tender Comrade as Ginger Rogers’ roommate and the female lead opposite Robert Mitchum in the same year’s When Strangers Marry. She was married in real life that year to marine captain William A. Baldwin. The marriage lasted just two years. Their daughter Kathryn would grow up to become a judge and mother of four.

After playing a supporting role in 1945’s You Came Along, Hunter went to England to play the female lead in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death. She also filmed a scene for the U.S. release of their 1944 film, A Canterbury Tale which was released in the U.S. until 1949. In the interim, she made her Broadway debut as Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire for which she won several theatre awards. She later won an Oscar for her performance in the film version, which she followed up with the female lead opposite Humphrey Bogart in 1952’s Deadline U.S.A..

Hunter married second husband, stage actor Robert Emmett in 1951, to whom she would remain married until his death in 2000. Their son became a rock musician and later a set decorator.

A political activist, Hunter signed a peace petition in 1949 which came under the scrutiny of HUAC. Suspected of being a communist, which she wasn’t, she was blacklisted for four years but continued to work, mostly on TV. She returned to films in 1956’s Storm Center in support of Bette Davis and played James MacArthur’s mother in 1957’s The Young Stranger while continuing her stage work and many appearances in TV dramas.

Hunter returned to film in 1964’s Lilith in support of Warren Beatty and in 1968 had her most memorable role since A Streetcar Named Desire in heavy makeup as the chimpanzee scientist in the landmark science fiction film, Planet of the Apes and reprised the role in the first two sequels in the early 1970s.

The actress had one of her best TV roles as the first Mrs. Wilson in the 1979 mini-series, Backstairs at the White House and received an Emmy nomination the following year for the daytime TV series, Edge of Night. She was one of four Oscar winning actresses to appear in an episode of Murder, She Wrote in support of Angela Lansbury. The others were Teresa Wright, Claire Trevor and Shirley Jones.

Her last film of note was 1997’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in which she played Jack Thompson’s secretary.

Kim Hunter died on September 11, 2002. She was 79.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943), directed by Mark Robson

One of producer Val Lewton’s most acclaimed horror films, this was the directing debut of former editor Mark Robson as well as the film debut of Janet Cole under her new name of Kim Hunter for the first time. A superb thriller, Hunter plays a young woman searching for her missing sister who uncovers a Satanic cult in New York’s Greenwich Village. Jean Brooks is the missing sister, Hugh Beaumont the sister’s husband and Tom Conway the mysterious psychiatrist who gets top billing as he was then the best-known player in the cast. Barbara Hale has an uncredited role as a subway passenger.

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

One of Powell and Pressburger’s best-loved films, Hunter plays the American radio operator who talks to World War II British pilot David Niven as the flyer about to jump out of his burning plane without a parachute. Finding he didn’t die in the fall, and isn’t in heaven after all, he searches for Hunter with whom he has fallen in love. His love for her sustains him when a heavenly escort comes to retrieve him. She later plays an important part in his heavenly trial. She followed this up with a specially filmed role in Powell & Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale for its U.S. release.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951), directed by Elia Kazan

Despite Hunter’s award-winning performance in the original Broadway production, she was not the first choice to play Marlon Brando’s wife, Stella, in the film version. Patricia Neal was considered for the role but was ultimately rejected as being too tall to be convincing as Vivien Leigh’s sister. Anne Baxter was then seriously considered but ultimately lost out to Hunter who won an Oscar as did co-stars Leigh and Karl Malden, the first of only two films thus far for which three of the film’s four stars won Oscars. Network, twenty-five years later, became the second.

PLANET OF THE APES (1968), directed by Franklin J. Schaffner

Hunter was once again not the first choice for another of her iconic roles, that of the brainy chimpanzee scientist in this landmark science-fiction epic starring Charlton Heston as the American astronaut that spawned a series of films that spawned yet another series in recent years. The original choice for the role was Ingrid Bergman who later regretted turning it down. Hunter and co-star Roddy McDowall both spent hours studying the facial expressions of apes at zoos so that they wouldn’t look like they were wearing masks, McDowall at the Los Angeles Zoo and Hunter closer to her New York home at the Bronx Zoo.

BACKSTAIRS AT THE WHITE HOUSE (1979), directed by Michael O’Herlihy

Hunter was one of five Oscar-winning actresses playing first ladies in this award-winning miniseries. She gives a very moving performance as Ellen Wilson, the first wife of Woodrow Wilson, played by Robert Vaughn, who dies in the White House. The others were Celeste Holm as Florence Harding, Lee Grant as Grace Coolidge, Eileen Heckart as Eleanor Roosevelt and Estelle Parsons as Bess Truman. Vaughn, Holm and Heckart were nominated for Emmys as were leads Olivia Cole, Leslie Uggams and Lou Gossett as White House staff and Ed Flanders as Calvin Coolidge in this fascinating saga of the White House from Taft through Eisenhower.