Submitted by
Roger Mellor
Kim Hunter
Oscar-winner who found new fame with 'Planet of the Apes'
The Telegraph; September 13th 2002
Kim Hunter, the American actress who died on Wednesday aged 79, used to
stress that she had no time for the dazzle of Hollywood stardom; it was as
well, then, that despite some excellent performances she only once
threatened the higher reaches of celebrity.
That was in 1951, when she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as
Stella Kowalski in the film of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named
Desire. Stella lives in a seedy New Orleans tenement with her brutal husband
Stanley (Marlon Brando); they get by on sex and not much else, though the
arrival of Stella's neurotic sister Blanche (Vivien Leigh) brings the
tension to bursting point.
A terrible matrimonial row is resolved when Stanley/Brando, clad in an
artistically torn T-shirt, lets out a primeval cry of pain for Stella, who
duly makes a highly charged descent down a winding staircase and into his
arms. Off set, Brando proved more frolicsome; when Kim Hunter retired for a
nap in her trailer, he shook it violently while yelling "Earthquake,
Earthquake".
After A Streetcar Named Desire, it seemed that Kim Hunter had a great career
in prospect. She was unlucky, though, to be named a fellow-traveller in a
rabid anti-Communist publication called Red Channels. In fact, she was
simply a liberal Democrat who fought for civil rights; in the era of Senator
Joseph McCarthy, however, that sufficed to incur suspicion of undermining
the American Constitution. Nor did Kim Hunter improve matters by sponsoring
a World Peace Conference held in New York in 1949.
In 1962 her testimony in the New York Supreme Court in a case which had been
brought against Red Channels helped clear several actors accused of
Communist connections. Nevertheless, the magazine's slur against her meant
that Kim Hunter appeared in only a few films in the 1950s. Later, however,
she appeared as Dr Ziva, the chimpanzee psychiatrist in Planet of the Apes
(1968). Her acting in the part was excellent; of her body, however, nothing
was visible but the eyeballs. She was also in Beneath the Planet of the Apes
(1969) and Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1970).
Kim Hunter was born Janet Cole in Detroit on November 12 1922. Her father, a
refrigerating engineer, died when she was only three, after which her mother
married Bliss Stebbins, a retired businessman in Miami Beach.
Janet Cole was a shy and lonely child, whose only brother was nine years
older; away from Miami High School, therefore, she was largely left to her
own devices. She developed a strong fantasy life, acting out in front of
mirrors the characters who sprang to her imagination. This led to lessons
with a drama coach, and from the age of 17 she was playing in repertory
theatre, eventually working at the Pasadena Playhouse, close to Hollywood.
There she was spotted by David Selznick, who was in charge of production at
RKO. He changed her name to Kim Hunter and gave her ingenue roles in The
Seventh Victim (1943) and Tender Comrade (1943). In When Strangers Marry
(1944), Variety reported, she was "attractive as well as appealing as the
distraught but loyal wife".
The next breakthrough occurred when Alfred Hitchcock, advised by his
14-year-old daughter, recommended her to Michael Powell for the part of the
all-American girl who talks sympathetically by radio to an English pilot
(David Niven) trapped in a blazing plane at the beginning of the British
film A Matter of Life and Death (1946).
The pilot appears to land safely, and successfully pursues the girl who owns
the voice he had heard. It transpires, however, that he is actually dead,
save that the messenger sent to escort him to the next life from his
spiralling aircraft had missed him in the fog. The film ends with a trial
scene in some heavenly antechamber where, to the outrage of The Daily
Telegraph's critic Campbell Dixon, the pilot is arraigned with the crime of
being English. Nor was Dixon mollified that he should be acquitted solely
through the love of a good American girl.
Back in America in 1947 Kim Hunter played Stella in the first Broadway
production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Excellent reviews, and the Critics'
Circle Award, secured her the role in the film. In 1951 she enjoyed another
stage success playing opposite Claude Rains in an adaptation of Arthur
Koestler's Darkness at Noon.
Her film credits included Deadline USA (with Humphrey Bogart, 1952); Storm
Centre (1956), an anti-McCarthy picture in which she appeared with Bette
Davis; The Young Stranger (1957); Lilith (1964); and The Swimmer (1968). By
the 1970s her screen career was mainly confined to television, in particular
in the soap opera The Edge of Night (1979 and 1980).
Generously, Kim Hunter spoke up for Elia Kazan in 1999, when voices were
raised against the award of an Oscar to a man who had reported people to
Congressional investigators during the McCarthy witch-hunts. "Artistic
achievement and the mistake someone made years ago don't belong together,"
she commented.
Kim Hunter married first, in 1944 (dissolved 1946) William Baldwin, a Marine
Air Corps pilot; they had a daughter, who became a judge in Connecticut.
She married secondly, in 1951, Robert Emmett, an actor, who died in 2000;
they had a son.
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