She labored with performers starting from Laurence Olivier to Andy Griffith in a profession disrupted for a time by the McCarthy-era blacklist.
LOS ANGELES — Marsha Hunt, one of many final surviving actors from Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age of the Nineteen Thirties and Forties who labored with performers starting from Laurence Olivier to Andy Griffith in a profession disrupted for a time by the McCarthy-era blacklist, has died. She was 104.
Hunt, who appeared in additional than 100 films and TV reveals, died Wednesday at her house in Sherman Oaks, California, stated 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 subsequent 15 years appeared in dozens of movies, from the Preston Sturges comedy “Easy Living” to the variation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” that starred Olivier and Greer Garson.
She was effectively below 40 when MGM named her “Hollywood’s Youngest Character Actress.” And by the early Nineteen Fifties, she was sufficient of a star to look on the duvet of Life journal and appear set to thrive within the new medium of tv when out of the blue “the work dried up,” she recalled in 1996.
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The cause, she realized from her agent, was that the communist-hunting Red Channels publication had revealed that she attended a peace convention in Stockholm and different supposedly suspicious gatherings. Alongside Hollywood stars Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart and Danny Kaye, Hunt additionally went to Washington in 1947 to protest the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was conducting a witch hunt for communists within the movie business.
“I’d made 54 movies in my first 16 years in Hollywood,” Hunt stated in 1996. “In the last 45 years, I’ve made eight. That shows what a blacklist can do to a career.”
Hunt targeting the theater, the place the blacklist was not noticed, till she started often getting movie work once more within the late Nineteen Fifties. She appeared within the touring corporations of “The Cocktail Party,” “The Lady’s Not for Burning” and “The Tunnel of Love,” and on Broadway in “The Devil’s Disciple,” “Legend of Sarah″ and “The Paisley Convertible.”
Marcia Virginia Hunt (she modified the spelling of her first identify later) was born in Chicago and grew up in New York City, daughter of a lawyer-insurance govt and a voice instructor. Slender and trendy, with a heat smile and enormous, expressive eyes, Hunt studied drama and labored as a mannequin earlier than making her movie debut.
An early marriage to director Jerry Hopper resulted in divorce. In 1948 she married movie author Robert Presnell Jr., they usually had one daughter, who died quickly after her untimely delivery. Her husband died in 1986.
Hunt’s first film was 1935′s “The Virginia Judge.” She went on to play demure roles in a sequence of movies for Paramount, together with “The Accusing Finger” and “Come on Leathernecks,” however, as she instructed The Associated Press in 2020, she was uninterested in “sweet young things” and begged for extra substantial work.
Hollywood proved a painful training. In “Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity,” she remembered virtually getting the a part of Melanie Wilkes in “Gone with the Wind,” even being assured by producer David O. Selznick. Within days, Olivia de Havilland was introduced because the actor who would play Melanie for the 1939 epic.
“That’s the day I grew up,” Hunt stated within the documentary. “That’s the day I knew I could never have my heart broken again by this profession of acting.”
She left Paramount for MGM across the time of “Gone with the Wind” and had lead or supporting roles in “These Glamour Girls,” “Flight Command” and “The Human Comedy” amongst different films.
“MGM was sheer magic,” she recalled in a 2007 Associated Press interview. “When I arrived on the studio for a one-day function, they parked my automotive. I went on the set and located a director’s chair with an indication on it, ‘Miss Hunt.’ Another signal was on my dressing room.
“I stated to myself, ‘Any studio that treats a one-day player that way, really knows how to make pictures.’ They received my loyalty.”
Work unraveled shortly after she overtly embraced liberal causes, comparable to becoming a member of the 1947 protest in opposition to congressional hearings on the reputed communist affect in Hollywood.
“I was never a communist or even interested in the communist cause,” she declared in 1996. “I was a political innocent defending my industry.”
With a few exceptions, comparable to producer Stanley Kramer’s 1952 household comedy “The Happy Time,” she was unseen on the massive display for many of the Nineteen Fifties. She later appeared in lots of TV sequence, together with “My Three Sons,” “Matlock,” “All in the Family” and “Murder, She Wrote.”
She remained vigorous and stylish in previous age. In 1993, she put out “The Way We Wore: Styles of the 1930s and ’40s and Our World Since Then,” a lavishly illustrated e-book of the fashions throughout her Hollywood heyday.
A lifelong political activist, Hunt had a brush with terror in 1962 when she took half in a discussion board on right-wing extremists and two different contributors’ properties have been broken by do-it-yourself bombs the exact same night.
“The ashen-faced actress said her home probably escaped the bomb attack only because the terrorists were unable to find out where she lived,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Police have been despatched to protect her house.
More just lately, she helped create a refuge for the homeless in Los Angeles’ Sherman Oaks neighborhood, the place she lived and was feted with the title honorary mayor.
Looking again on her activist years, 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.”
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