Holly Hunter

Holly Paige Hunter was born in the old South of the United States, in Conyers, Georgia, on March 20, 1958. She was the youngest of seven children born to a housewife and a farmer who owned his own plantation. At the age of 9 she received piano lessons. Encouraged by her parents, she decided to study acting at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

When he graduated, he moved to New York to try to carve out a career in the prestigious theaters of the city that never sleeps. Since she did not have many resources, she was forced to share a flat with another aspiring actress who would also establish herself over time, a certain Frances McDormand . Both lived in a humble area of ​​the Bronx. “The part where my block was was mostly Irish, but if you walked a few blocks, everyone was Italian,” Hunter recalls.

After a season of unsuccessful casting calls, Holly Hunter hit a lucky break when she suddenly found herself trapped with another woman in a blocked elevator. As she was being pulled out of it, she had a long conversation with her captive partner, who turned out to be playwright Beth Henley . She noticed her enormous potential and ended up giving her roles in her works, specifically Holly Hunter replaced Mary Beth Hurt on Broadway in “Crimes of the Heart”, and starred in the off-Broadway performance of ” Miss America.”

He made his film debut in 1981 in the forgotten horror film La quema . She decided to move to Los Angeles to have more opportunities to work. There she went little by little, since she made a couple of TV movies, she was a secondary in Girls at War , by Jonathan Demme and her old acquaintance Frances McDormand recommended her to the director of a film she was going to star in, and who was her fiancé at the time. , a newcomer named Joel Coen , who had conceived with his brother Ethan the tape, Easy Blood . Unfortunately Hunter could only be given the task of giving voice to a vending machine.

Despite the humility of the proposal, the Coens were successful, and because they had noticed Hunter’s talent, they signed her to star in their second feature, Arizona Baby , opposite Nicolas Cage . Hunter was not bad at playing one of those almost surreal characters of the brothers, specifically a police officer who leaves the force after falling in love with a thief whom he has arrested, and who plans with him the kidnapping of a baby, because they both cannot have children.

The film was a delight and opened the doors of big business for Hunter, recruited by James L. Brooks to play a dynamic newscaster in the hilarious Breaking News , for which she earned an Academy Award nomination for best actress. She also starred under the orders of Thomas Schlamme in Miss America , a film version of one of Beth Henley’s plays that she had performed on stage.

She was also noticed by Steven Spielberg himself , who made her the wife of an aviator who died in an accident in Always (Forever) , unfortunately one of the least grossing films of King Midas. Even so, the tape deserves to be remembered for at least two things: because it was the last appearance in the cinema of the legendary Audrey Hepburn and for Holly Hunter’s intense dance with Richard Dreyfuss , who exuded romanticism on all four sides. In fact, the two got back together in Dear Intruder .

To most mainstream audiences, Holly Hunter is best remembered as the mute mother who married powers and ended up having an extramarital affair in The Piano . For her work, she won the Oscar, the BAFTA, the Golden Globe, and the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Post Oscar, Hunter was the receptionist with Tom Cruise in The Cover , a detective in search of a murderer with Sigourney Weaver in Copycat , a doctor who suffers a car accident in Crash (1996) , by David Cronenberg , sent from heaven O’ Reilly in A Different Story , DA in The Compromise (2002) , and the mother of a turkey-age girl in Thirteen . She returned to work with the Coens on O Brother! , gave the voice to the superheroine Elastigirl in The Incredibles and Rodrigo García used her toThings I’d Say Just Looking at Her and Nine Lives .

The actress suffers from deafness in one ear, which sometimes complicates the filming of a sequence. In 1995, she married Janusz Kaminski , a prestigious cinematographer who is a regular in Steven Spielberg’s films, but the two divorced in 2001. Since then, Holly Hunter has been in a relationship with actor Gordon MacDonald, who has appeared in a supporting role alongside her. in the series Saving Grace , where Holly Hunter is an executive producer and plays the protagonist, a police officer who receives the unexpected help of an angel. MacDonald and Hunter were the parents of twins in 2006.