Helen Hunt

At 61 years old, Helen Hunt has this physical status:

Career

In the 1970s, Hunt began acting as a child actor. Her early appearances included an appearance on The Mary Tyler Moore Show as the granddaughter of George Segal's main character in Rollercoaster (1977), alongside Lindsay Wagner in an episode of Ark II titled "Omega," and a regular presence in the television series The Swiss Family Robinson. On an episode of The Facts of Life, she appeared as a marijuana-smoking classmate. In 1982, Hunt played a young woman who leaps out of a second-story window in a made-for-television film called Desperate Lives (a scene in which she mocked during a Saturday Night Live monologue in 1994), and she was cast on ABC's It Takes Two, which lasted only one season. She appeared on Bill: On His Own, with Mickey Rooney and Tami Maida in the fact-based film Quarterback Princess in 1983; both were made-for television films. She appeared on St. Germain on several occasions. In a two-part episode of Highway to Heaven, Clancy Williams, the mother of Jack "Boomer" Morrison, made a memorable guest appearance as a cancer-stricken mother-to-be.

Hunt had appeared in studio films aimed at a teen audience by the mid-19 1980s. In the sci-fi film Trancers (1984), she played a punk rock girl for her first major film role. In the comedy Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985), she appeared alongside Sarah Jessica Parker and Shannen Doherty, and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), alongside Kathleen Turner. Hunt appeared in Project X in 1987 as a graduate student with responsibility for chimpanzees used in a classified Air Force operation. Hope Wyatt, Billy Wyatt's sister, was cast in Stealing Home in 1988 as Hope Wyatt, played by Mark Harmon and a cast starring Jodie Foster and Harold Ramis. Contradiction to Patrick Swayze and Liam Neeson, next of Kin (1989) featured her as the pregnant wife of a decent lawman.

Hunt appeared in a Wild West interpretation of The Taming of the Shrew in 1990 at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, with Tracey Ullman and Morgan Freeman. Hunt starred in Trancers II, the direct-to-video sequel to Trancers (1984), and appeared in My Life and Times, which only aired for six episodes in 1991. She will appear in The Waterdance as a married woman having an affair with a writer; in the harem comedy Only You as a travel agent and the love interest of a doll's house designer; and as Annie Wells, a young agent. Hunt appeared in Trancers III, the second sequel to the Trancers series, including Trancers 1.5, which was one of her five film debuts this year, in 1992.

Hunt appeared on Mad About You (1992–99), in which she starred opposite Paul Reiser as a public relations specialist and one half of a couple in NYC. She went on to win Emmy Awards for her appearances in 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. Reiser and Hunt earned $1 million ($1.6 million today) per episode for the show's final season. Several episodes of Mad About You, including the series's finale, were directed by her.

Hunt portrayed an ex-convival of Queens in Kiss of Death, a loosely based recreation of the 1947 film noir classic of the same name. Hunt appeared as storm chasers researching tornadoes in Bill Paxton's disaster action film Twister (1996). Both actors were temporarily blinded by bright electronic lamps halfway through filming, and they desperately needed hepatitis shots after shooting in a particularly unsanitary ditch. Twister was the second-most grossing film of 1996, after Independence Day. In the United States, the film attracted 54,688,100 viewers. Around the world, it earned US$494.5 million.

Hunt went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress in the romantic comedy As Good As It Gets (1997), in which she played a waitress and single mother who falls in love with a misanthropic, obsessive romance novelist, played by Jack Nicholson. Hunt and Nicholson got along well during filming, and they connected straight away: "It wasn't even what we said." Hunt continued, "It was just a time we both had to tune into that was very, very similar." On-screen, author and screenwriter Andrew Horton likened the difference between "fire and ice, oil, and water, which is apparently contradictory." Nevertheless, Hunt was Nicholson's most convincing partner, and she gave "a simply stunning appearance," wrote critic Louise Keller. The film was a huge box office success, grossing US$314 million worldwide. She appeared on "Dumbbell Indemnity" on The Simpsons in 1998 and performed Viola in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night at Lincoln Center in New York.

In October, two of Hunt's four films, the comedy Dr. T & the Women and the drama Pay It Forward, were both released. Although the first featured her as one of the women that encompassed a wealthy gynecologist's everyday life, Richard Gere's replacement starred her as the love interest of a physically and emotionally strained grade school teacher, played by Kevin Spacey. Roger Ebert, a writer, praised her role in Pay It Forward, despite the fact that the film itself was "too emotionally manipulative." In December, her two new 2000 films, "What Women Want" and the drama Cast Away, were both released, to high box office receipts. Hunt co-worker and love interest of a Chicago executive, and in Cast Away, she depicted the long-term girlfriend of a FedEx employee marooned on an uninhabited island alongside Tom Hanks.

Hunt appeared in Woody Allen's The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) as an efficiency specialist hypnotized by a crooked hypnotist into stealing jewels. Despite the film's modest success, Roger Ebert said: "Hunt in particular has fun with a wisecracking dame role that may owes a lot to Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday." Hunt returned to Broadway in 2003 in Yasmina Reza's Life x 3, and in 2004, she appeared in A Good Woman as a femme fatale in 1930s NYC. In its review of the former, the AV Club wrote: "Helen Hunt appears to be ostensibly out of place pretending to be a infamous seductress." In Emilio Estevez's drama Bobby (2006) about the hours leading up to Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, she played a socialite. She was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Cast in a Motion Picture, but she received the Hollywood Film Festival Award for Best Ensemble Cast.

Hunt's debut in Then She Found Me (2007), in which she was also a 39-year-old Brooklyn elementary school teacher who was contacted by the flamboyant host of a local talk show, played by Bette Midler, who introduces herself as her biological mother. She tried to interest several studios in the subject after first reading Elinor Lipman's book, but her inability led her to begin writing the screenplay and raising funds to produce it herself. "You would expect that frontloading Then She Found Me with so much plot would make it sound like a soap opera," Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote on its website. However, Hunt saves the film from this fate in two ways. She appears in a touchingly true role, the best of her big-screen career. Forget that As Good as It Gets won her an Academy Award. Helen's eons are becoming more realistic in this one [...] Hunt keeps Then She Found Me, which makes it its savior as well [...] [...] Hunt knows when to bring the Divine Miss M to a halt rather than encouraging her to go into full Kabuki mode. [She] also coaxes pitch-perfect performances from Broderick and Firth."

Hunt appeared in Every Day (2010) as one half of a married couple fell apart as a result of increasing responsibilities. The film "comes as a reminder of [Hunt's] talent for understatement," according to Los Angeles' Los Angeles Times, and as a desire to see more of her." She played the mother of the Hawaiian-born champion surfer Bethany Hamilton, on whose life the film was based. Soul Surfer's first wide release since 2001's The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Volume I.

Cheryl Cohen-Greene, a sex surrogate, appeared in The Sessions (2012) alongside John Hawkes and William H. Macy. Hunt had to perform multiple scenes of full-frontal nudity, but she later said: "Being naked was daunting, but even more vulnerable was being naked." Because I was naked, I felt vulnerable. Because we were in the midst of such sadness in this character's life, I felt vulnerable. This was a real journey that someone else had undertaken, and I wanted to do right by it." Her appearance was lauded by critics and gained her multiple award nominations, including one for Best Supporting Actress. "Hunt's success may be physically impressive, but it is also marked by its patience and composure," Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter said.

In the independent drama Decoding Annie Parker (2013), Hunt played research geneticist Mary-Claire King, which received a mixed critical response. After she decided not to enroll in classes and become a survivor, she wrote and directed Ride (2004), in which she also appeared as a mother who migrates cross-country to California to visit her son. Helen Hunt's unquestionable acting ability was reaffirmed by the Rotten Tomatoes' critical consensus, but she also needs time to develop as a director."

Hunt played Kathy Bresnahan, a volleyball coach, in The Miracle Season (2018), based on the true story of the Iowa City West High School volleyball team. Hunt reprised Jamie Buchman's role in the Mad About You revival, which premiered as a limited series by Spectrum Originals, as journalist Nancy Campbell, inspired by real-life war correspondent Clare Hollingworth.

Hunt appeared in Tye Sheridan's crime drama The Night Clerk in 2020. Hunt was confirmed in December 2020 that he would appear in a leading role in the Starz film Blindspotting, directed by Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal and based on their 2018 film of the same name. In September 2022, she will appear in The Old Vic theatre in London for the European premiere of Euphoria Day.

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