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| Photo Credit: AP. |
TORONTO (AP) — Marsha Hunt, one of the last surviving actors from Hollywood’s so-called 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” that starred Olivier and
Greer Garson.
She was well
under 40 when MGM named her “Hollywood’s Youngest Character Actress.” And by
the early 1950s, she was enough of a star to appear on the cover of Life
magazine and seem 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 Hollywood stars Lauren
Bacall, Humphrey Bogart and Danny Kaye, Hunt also went to Washington in 1947 to
protest the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was conducting a
witch hunt 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 occasionally getting film work again in the late 1950s. She appeared in
the touring companies 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 changed the spelling of her first name later) was born in
Chicago and grew up in New York City, daughter of a lawyer-insurance executive
and a voice teacher. Slender and stylish, with a warm smile and large,
expressive eyes, 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 Jr., and they had one daughter, who died soon after her
premature birth. Her husband died in 1986.
Hunt’s first
movie was 1935′s “The Virginia Judge.” She went on to play demure roles in a
series of films for Paramount, 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.
Hollywood
proved a painful education. In “Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity,” she remembered
almost getting the part of Melanie Wilkes in “Gone with the Wind,” even being
assured by producer David O. Selznick. Within days, Olivia de Havilland was
announced as the actor who would play Melanie for the 1939 epic.
“That’s the day I grew up,” Hunt said in 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 around the time of “Gone with the Wind” and had lead or
supporting roles in “These Glamour Girls,” “Flight Command” and “The Human
Comedy” among other movies.
“MGM was
sheer magic,” she recalled in a 2007 Associated Press interview. “When I
arrived at the studio for a one-day role, they parked my car. I went on the set
and found a director’s chair with a sign on it, ‘Miss Hunt.’ Another sign was
on my dressing room.
“I said to
myself, ‘Any studio that treats a one-day player that way, really knows how to
make pictures.’ They won my loyalty.”
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 never a communist or even interested in
the communist cause,” she declared in 1996. “I was a political innocent defending
my industry.”
With a
couple of exceptions, such as producer Stanley Kramer’s 1952 family comedy “The
Happy Time,” she was unseen on the big screen for most of the 1950s. She later
appeared in many TV series, including “My Three Sons,” “Matlock,” “All in the Family”
and “Murder, She Wrote.”
She remained
vigorous and elegant in old age. In 1993, she put out “The Way We Wore: Styles
of the 1930s and ’40s and Our World Since Then,” a lavishly illustrated book of
the fashions during her Hollywood heyday.
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 other participants’ homes were damaged
by homemade bombs the very same evening.
“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 were sent to guard her home.
More recently, she helped create a refuge for the homeless in Los Angeles’ Sherman Oaks neighborhood, where she lived and was feted with the title honorary mayor.
Looking back
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.”
This story
has been corrected to fix the spelling of Humphrey Bogart’s first name.
The late
Associated Press writer Bob Thomas contributed to this obituary.