Look back at Helen Hunt’s storied
“I’m not a perfect person. I’m filled with flaws and weaknesses. I think that’s what people respond to when they look at me.”
ALTHOUGH HER father was a theater director, Helen Elizabeth Hunt’s pursuit of acting early on came from somewhere you wouldn’t expect. “There was something magical about watching Bewitched, and I loved Elizabeth Montgomery...I always thought that I would love to play this role in a series and play the part of the good witch Samantha. I thought about acting and that it would be a good job.” Of course, the then-shy girl would eventually find her own share of magic, winning four Emmys for Mad
About You and an Oscar for As Good as It Gets. But it wasn’t easy. “I had my little, quiet ups and downs as opposed to a huge up or a huge down in front of everyone. I think you sort of build up the muscle that way.” Now Helen, who turns 57 on June 15, has found just as much enjoyment flexing her talent as a director and as mother to daughter Makena. “Almost everything negative has turned into a positive — it’s just hellish getting there. But when I can remind myself that I am fall-to-my-knees lucky and should be fall-to-my-knees grateful, these big
negatives are not so bad as they feel.”
1
1975 ALL KIDDING ASIDE
“I probably could have done better in TV if I’d been thinking,” Helen said of her early career, which included starring on Swiss Family Robinson and playing Murray’s daughter on The Mary Tyler Moore
Show. “But I was lucky enough, in a way, not to ever be incredibly successful, so I could gain a lot of experience but not be known as ‘the kid on that show.’ ”
2
1985 MAKE FUN “It is so ’80s,” she said of Girls Just Want to Have Fun with Sarah Jessica Parker. “Talk about scrunchies and hair bows! I don’t watch any of my old movies, though. It’s in a part of my brain that’s behind a door that’s in a vault that’s in a box that you need a special key to get into. It’d be creepy if I was sitting there alone watching my own movies! … I want to be relevant.”
3
1992 LIKE MAD
“Oh, I had given up,” Helen once admitted. “There were moments in the ’80s when I was disgusted with the kind of bad TV movies and bad series I was working on. Those were a pretty sad few years for me but then I said to myself, ‘OK, you’re not going to be a big star, so what? You make good money, you live very well and you only have to work a few times a year. It’s not a bad life.’ Then came Mad About You and my life changed.”
4
1996 AS THE WIND BLOWS “It was terrifying every day,” revealed Helen of shooting the hit Twister, with Bill Paxton. “[Getting] to be the woman in the center of this action movie was fantastic. That was the good part, the bad part was it was terrifying to make. It was just at the beginning of everything being done on the computer, so a lot of it wasn’t done on the computer. Every day it was like, ‘What fresh hell is this? Oh, a hail machine. Fantastic.’”
5
1998 GOOD NATURE “I don’t think it’s a big game changer,” reflected Helen of winning an Oscar, along with Jack Nicholson for As Good as It Gets. “It can be, but it’s not like your worries are over in terms of getting good parts. I’ve had ups and downs. It was a dream come true, which is a great thing to be able to say; then you go back to work, trying to forge a career that’s fulfilling.”
6
2000 FORWARD THINKING
“It’s so funny when people ask: ‘What happened to you?’” said Helen after she took time off following turns in Pay It Forward, Dr. T & the Women, Cast Away and What Women Want all in the same year. “Well, I had a baby — I made a whole person…it didn’t seem so quiet to me. There’s a difference between working hard and being famous.”
7
2007 SEE ME After starting her family, Helen wrote, produced, directed and starred in the family drama Then She Found Me. “Things that are me are all the things that this movie is about — love, betrayal, faith, loss of faith, being a parent, being a daughter. So if you just pull back and sort of look at it as a movie, look at an X-ray, I’m in there everywhere.”
8
2011 ALL A BOARD Taking on the biopic Soul Surfer was an easy choice since, “I got to take my daughter with me and shoot in my favorite place on earth. They were like, ‘Do you want to go to Oahu and bring your daughter and surf in a movie?’ I went, OK! The opportunity to be paid and have my family with me and be in heaven was pretty great.”
9
2012 NAKED EYE While her role in The Sessions was provocative, “Any hesitation I had about the nudity, I think what I thought was it’s getting late. You know what I mean? It’s getting too late in my life to care about the small things. It’s getting too late to not be brave, to not live my life fully, to not try to be an artist. Trivial things like you have to be naked for a while, they fade away.”
10
2019 BEAR IN MIND “I’m interested and very moved by this idea that your calling is to bear witness,” she said of her WWII reporter on TV’s World on Fire. “Before we could all bear witness on our cellphones, it was people like Nancy we relied upon to ensure that the truth wasn’t massaged or flipped. She is there in order that people don’t forget.”