Kim Hunter
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Kim Hunter |
Bucks County Playhouse productions
Linda Stone Is Brutal - Paula Maugham - 1964
Internet Movie Database - Kim Hunter
Internet Broadway Database - Kim Hunter
Kim Hunter
(1922 - 2002)
Actress Kim Hunter is best known for her Oscar-winning role as Stella Kowalski opposite Marlon Brando in the 1951 screen classic "A Streetcar Named Desire". Hunter, whose role in a 1943 Ginger Rogers film about women who lived communally during World War Two led to her being blacklisted as a suspected communist during the 1950s.
Hunter amassed an impressive array of stage, film and TV credits during a career spanning seven decades, appearing as recently as last year in an off-Broadway revival of The Madwoman of Chaillot for the Neighborhood Playhouse." Her varied career included Broadway credits in the 1950s productions of Darkness at Noon and The Children's House; a screen role as the ape-woman Zira in the original 1968 "Planet of the Apes" and two sequels; and an Emmy-nominated turn on the ABC daytime drama "The Edge of Night".
Hunter is perhaps best remembered as Brando's long-suffering and loyal wife Stella, the younger sister of Vivien Leigh's Blanche DuBois, in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, a role she originated on Broadway. Her big-screen performance earned Hunter an Academy Award for best supporting actress. The following year, she co-starred as the ex-wife of a newspaper editor played by Humphrey Bogart in "Deadline U.S.A." and appeared opposite José Ferer in the comedy "Anything Can Happen".
Born Janet Cole in Detroit and raised in Miami, Florida, Hunter made her stage debut in a local production where she was spotted by talent scouts and put under contract by film producer David O. Selznick. She was loaned out for her first film, the 1943 thriller The Seventh Victim, and the same year was cast with Ginger Rogers in Edward Dmytryk's Tender Comrade, about a group of of women who shared a house while their husbands were off serving in World War Two.
Partly as a result of her appearance in that film, Hunter's name surfaced in Red Channels, a pamphlet listing those suspected of having communist sympathies, and she ended up on the Hollywood blacklist.
She continued to work on stage and resumed film acting as the blacklisting faded. She also chalked up numerous TV credits as far back as 1948 as a recurring player on ABC's "Actors Studios" and with guest roles ranging from an Emmy-nominated turn on "Baretta" to an appearance on the NBC sitcom "Mad About You".
She returned to Broadway in 1996 for a revival of An Ideal Husband at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where she had co-starred in A Streetcar Named Desire years before. Hunter returned to feature films with a small part in Clint Eastwood's 1997 drama "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil".