Submitted by
Roger Mellor
Kim Hunter
Oscar-winner who found new fame with 'Planet of the Apes'
The Independent; September 13th 2002
Janet Cole (Kim Hunter), actress: born Detroit 12 November 1922; married
1944 William Baldwin (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1946), 1951 Robert
Emmett (died 2000; one son); died New York 11 September 2002.
The actress Kim Hunter won enduring fame when she created the role of Stella
Kowalski, tormented wife of the brutish Stanley (Marlon Brando), in the
original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire directed by Elia
Kazan. She repeated her role in the film version, winning an Academy Award
as Best Supporting Actress.
A popular member of her profession, she was described by Kazan as "unique
among actresses – she is first a person and second a member of the acting
profession". She will also be remembered as the heroine of the
Powell-Pressburger fantasy A Matter of Life and Death and for her later role
as the sensible ape Dr Zira in the first three "Planet of the Apes" films.
Her role as the nose-twitching simian brought her a higher degree of fame
than any other. "While Streetcar has become a classic, and A Matter of Life
and Death is a classic," she said recently,
those ape films have become a cult in their own right. People from all over
the world write to me about those films.
Charlton Heston, who starred with her in the first two of the Apes movies,
echoed Kazan's words this week when he also called Hunter "a unique talent",
adding, "It is my distinct privilege to have worked with her."
Born Janet Cole in Detroit, Michigan, in 1922, and educated at Miami Beach
High School, Hunter became interested in acting while a child. "I was lonely
growing up," she said:
My only brother was nine years older, and had little time for me. So I
picked friends out of books and played let's-pretend games, acting out their
characters before a mirror.
She made her stage début at the age of 17 when she joined a little theatre
group in Miami, after which she acted with various repertory companies. She
was appearing in the play Arsenic and Old Lace at the Pasadena Playhouse in
1942 when she was seen by the producer David O. Selznick, who put her under
contract. She made her screen début in Mark Robson's The Seventh Victim
(1943), a chillingly atmospheric tale in which she was an innocent in
Manhattan who becomes involved with a group of devil-worshippers. One of the
famous bunch of exceptional B-movies produced by Val Lewton, it is now
regarded as a minor classic.
Hunter was another innocent in When Strangers Marry (1944), this time
finding that the man she has married hastily may be a murderer. Dean Jagger
was the husband, and co-starring as the hero was another rising star, Robert
Mitchum. The modestly budgeted film made by the minor studio Monogram is
another B-movie that received exceptional reviews.
In Tender Comrade (1943), directed by Edward Dmytryk and written by Dalton
Trumbo, Hunter portrayed one of a group of wartime factory workers who pool
their resources to rent a house. The film, with its philosophy of "share and
share alike", was to haunt its makers years later when it was cited as
Communist propaganda. Disowned by its star, Ginger Rogers, it was to be used
against Hunter when at the height of anti-Communist hysteria she was
labelled a leftist sympathiser.
In 1945, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger travelled to the United
States with two objectives – to discuss the American distribution of their
film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and to find an "ideal American
girl" to play the heroine of their next production, A Matter of Life and
Death. While visiting Alfred Hitchcock in Hollywood, they told him they
wanted a girl who was "simple, sensible and pretty, and looks good in a
uniform". Hitchcock immediately suggested Hunter, whom he had directed in a
test for Selznick.
Michael Powell wrote of his first encounter with the actress:
Hitch had been right. Kim Hunter had chestnut hair and green eyes. She was
brave, pretty and sensible and very well put together. When she spoke, her
voice was delightful. When she acted, imagination and intelligence showed in
every line she spoke.
In the film, her first in colour, Hunter was appealingly sympathetic as the
wireless operator who finds herself falling in love with a pilot (David
Niven) who has contacted her when he is about to crash. After completing the
film she returned to New York, where Irene Selznick, David's wife, was about
to produce Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire. Irene asked
Kazan to consider Hunter for the role of Stella. Kazan was later to write,
The minute I saw her I was attracted to her, which is the best possible
reaction for a director when casting young women.
During the play's run, Hunter studied at the Actors' Studio, along with her
co-stars Marlon Brando and Karl Malden, and she would become angry in later
years when she heard the studio described as the home of a mumbling and
shuffling style of performance. "Does Karl Malden slur his words?" she
asked.
Or Tom Ewell, or Eli Wallach, or Eva Marie Saint, or Julie Harris? All
Actors' Studio, all as articulate as you can get.
Hunter's marvellous performance in the film version survived what Kazan
considered some ruthless cutting of the film to conform with the then
current censorship standards. He wrote in his memoirs,
There was a brilliant close-up - I'm speaking of Kim Hunter's performance,
not my direction - of her coming down the stairs to her husband when he's
called desperately for her to come back. This close-up had been cut short
and with it the piece of music Alex North had written. The shot and the music
were both considered "too carnal".
(The cut footage was later restored to the film, and it makes more sense of
Stella's submissiveness and her response when Stanley bellows his iconic
command, "Hey, Stella!")
At the 1951 Oscar ceremonies, Vivien Leigh, Hunter and Karl Malden all won
awards for their work in Streetcar – the only one of the film's stars not to
win was Marlon Brando, who lost to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. The
following year Hunter was featured as Bogart's estranged wife in the
newspaper drama Deadline, USA, but her name had by then appeared in Red
Channels, the notorious pamphlet that listed alleged Communist sympathisers,
and she was blacklisted for several years.
Hunter was not a Communist, but was a keen supporter of civil rights, and
she attributed her blacklisting to her involvement with a world peace
symposium she helped sponsor in 1949. In 1962 her testimony in the New York
Supreme Court against the publishers of Red Channels cleared the way for
others to have their names removed.
In 1999, when Elia Kazan, who had named names during the blacklisting days,
was awarded a special Oscar, the acting community was divided in its
response, but Hunter was one of the minority who were forgiving. "The whole
business is dumb," she stated. "Artistic achievement and the mistake someone
made years ago don't belong together."
The blacklisting doubtless damaged the progress of Hunter's film career, but
she kept busy on television and in the theatre. On Broadway she starred in
Darkness at Noon (1951) and she played Karen, one of two friends who run a
school and find their lives ruined by slander, in Lillian Hellman's The
Children's Hour (1952). In The Tender Trap (1954) she had a rare comedy role
as Sylvia Crewe, a worldly wise career girl who is one of the girlfriends of
a free-living bachelor - Celeste Holm played Sylvia in the film version.
She returned to the screen to play the assistant of a librarian (Bette
Davis) who refuses to bow to book censorship in the well-meaning but
ineffectual Storm Center (1956). The following year she played the mother of
a rebellious youth (James MacArthur) in the first film directed by John
Frankenheimer, The Young Stranger. Hunter had worked with the director on
such television anthologies as Playhouse 90. Her other television
appearances (which ran into hundreds) included roles in Rawhide, Naked City,
Dr Kildare, Bonanza, Cannon and Gunsmoke.
In 1961 she spent a season at the Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford,
Connecticut, where she played Rosalind in As You Like It, a witch in
Macbeth, and Helen in Troilus and Cressida.
Film roles in Lilith (1964) and The Swimmer (1968) preceded her casting as
the coquettish chimpanzee psychiatrist in Planet of the Apes (1968). She
recalled,
My agent sent me the script and I thought it was a bloody good script and
story. I liked what happened in it, and Zira was a fascinating character.
It was difficult to recognise her beneath the layers of latex and hair which
transformed her into a simian. The long make-up sessions, taking over four
hours daily, were a gruelling ordeal which Hunter solved by obtaining a
prescription of Valium:
I took it as soon as I sat down in the make-up chair. And Roddy McDowall,
who played my mate Cornelius, brought in a tape recorder and he played opera
and classical music all during our make-up sessions, which helped a lot too.
Frequently Roddy and I were together in the same make-up area. He played
beautiful music and I'd take my Valium.
Hunter appeared in the next two films in the series, Beneath the Planet of
the Apes (1970) and Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971). The latter,
in which her character died, was one of her favourites:
Roddy and I reprised our roles as simian scientists and we were joined by
Sal Mineo. We had escaped the holocaust that ended the previous film and
found ourselves in modern-day Los Angeles. I
think it was the funniest and gentlest film of the series, and it showed a
tender and tragic love story between Roddy and myself. Of course, in
modern-day LA these talking "apes" became curiosities and celebrities. The
picture was also a perceptive satire on the nature of celebrity.
Hunter, who consistently received fan mail relating to the Apes films from
all over the world, stated that the cult status of the films did not
surprise her:
I think the theme is just as valid today as it was then, and it will also
be, years from now. It's about the problem that creatures have with
creatures who are not like themselves. It was a reverse kind of satirical
comment on the problem, by having the apes not happy with the human beings,
as opposed to human beings not being happy with the apes, but it made its
point. It's something that people can relate to throughout history. It's not
going to stop.
Most of Hunter's subsequent work was on television or in the theatre. In
1973 she starred as Mary Haines in a revival of The Women, and she was Mme
Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard (1976). On television she appeared in
Murder, She Wrote and in two daytime serials, The Edge of Night (for which
she won a daytime Emmy nomination in 1980) and As the World Turns.
In October 2001 she made her last television acting appearance in an episode
of the Richard Dreyfuss series The Education of Max Bickford, and earlier
this year she was interviewed for the forthcoming documentary Broadway: The
Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There.
Hunter was married twice. In 1944 she wed a Marine captain, William Baldwin,
and they had a daughter who became a judge. The couple divorced in 1946 and
in 1951 she married Robert Emmett, who was head writer on the American
version of the satirical television revue series That Was the Week That Was.
They had a son, now a rock musician, and the marriage lasted until Emmett's
death in 2000.
In 1975 Hunter wrote a book, Loose in the Kitchen, which she described as
"an autobiographical cookbook".
Kim Hunter's colleagues frequently stated that she should have been a
greater star, but she consistently resisted the typecasting which might have
given her a higher profile, and recently said, "The work itself has been my
life." One producer, seeking to pinpoint her special quality, said,
Well, she's no pin-up, and you wouldn't say she had glamour exactly, or sex
appeal ... I guess she has nothing but talent.
The actress herself told the New York Herald Tribune,
When I first began acting, I had a heck of a time. Everybody wanted to type
me. You're not with it if you're not labelled. What a bore that is, let me
tell you.
Tom Vallance
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