Golden Age star’s activism led to McCarthy-era blacklisting

Marsha Hunt, one of the last surviving actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s who worked with performers ranging from Laurence Olivier to Andy Griffith in a career disrupted for a time by the McCarthy-era blacklist, has died. She was 104.

Hunt, who appeared in more than 100 movies and TV shows, died Wednesday at her home in Sherman Oaks, California, said Roger Memos, the writer-director of the 2015 documentary “Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity.”

A Chicago native, she arrived in Hollywood in

1935 and over the next 15 years appeared in dozens of films, from the Preston Sturges comedy “Easy Living” to the adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

She was well under 40 when MGM named her “Hollywood’s Youngest Character Actress.” By the early 1950s, she seemed set to thrive in the new medium of television when suddenly, “the work dried up,” she recalled in 1996.

The reason, she learned from her agent, was that the communist-hunting Red Channels publication had revealed that she attended a peace conference in Stockholm and other supposedly suspicious gatherings. Alongside stars Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart and Danny Kaye, Hunt went to Washington in

1947 to protest the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was looking for communists in the film industry.

“I’d made 54 movies in my first 16 years in Hollywood,” Hunt said in 1996. “In the last 45 years, I’ve made eight. That shows what a blacklist can do to a career.”

Hunt concentrated on the theater, where the blacklist was not observed, until she began getting film work again in the late 1950s. She appeared on Broadway in “The Devil’s Disciple,” “Legend of Sarah” and “The Paisley Convertible.”

Marcia Virginia Hunt (she later changed the spelling of her first name) grew up in New York City, the daughter of a lawyerinsurance executive and a voice teacher. Hunt studied drama and worked as a model before making her film debut.

An early marriage to director Jerry Hopper ended in divorce. In 1948 she married film writer Robert Presnell, and they had one daughter, who died soon after her premature birth. Presnell died in

1986.

Hunt’s first movie was

1935’s “The Virginia Judge.” She went on to play demure roles in films including “The Accusing Finger” and “Come on Leathernecks,” but, as she told The Associated Press in 2020, she

was tired of “sweet young things” and begged for more substantial work.

Work unraveled quickly after she openly embraced liberal causes, such as joining the 1947 protest against congressional hearings on the reputed communist influence in Hollywood.

“I was a political innocent defending my industry,” she declared in 1996.

She later appeared on TV, including “My Three Sons,” “Matlock,” “All in the Family” and “Murder, She Wrote.”

A lifelong political activist, Hunt had a brush with terror in 1962 when she took part in a forum on right-wing extremists and two participants’ homes were bombed that evening. More recently, she helped create a refuge for the homeless in a Los Angeles neighborhood.

Hunt remarked in 1996: “I never craved an identity as a figure of controversy. But having weathered it and found other interests in the meantime, I can look back with some philosophy.”

AP Actor Marsha Hunt appeared in more than 100 films and TV shows. Her career was disrupted by protests that put her on the Hollywood blacklist. Hunt died Wednesday at 104.