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That Gal!: Linda Hunt

Posted by Peter Smith
We’ve discussed in this space before the fact that it’s a lot easier to build a career as a character actor if you’re a man than it is if you’re a woman. Even in today’s Hollywood — or should I say, especially in today’s Hollywood — men are allowed to be quirky, unattractive, unconventionally charismatic; while women are allowed to be beautiful. It’s hard to develop a reputation for playing smart, idiosyncratic characters with unusual looks in a town where Britney Spears and Kate Winslet are considered grotesquely overweight. Still, you really don’t appreciate how bad things can be until you consider the fact that one of the movie business’ most talented actresses won her only Academy Award. . . for playing a man. Diminutive, husky-voiced New Jersey native Linda Hunt was clearly never going to be a big-screen superstar; her throaty, almost masculine vocal tone and 4'9" frame seemed to guarantee that if she got work it all, it would be in gimmick roles and stunt casting. But director Peter Weir saw enough genuine talent in her to give her the role of guide and photographer Billy Kwan in his 1982 political drama The Year of Living Dangerously; her towering performance was enough to get her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Unlike other pieces of gender-bending casting trickery like Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry or Felicity Huffman in TransAmerica, there was nothing artificial or calculating in the role: Hunt took a professional approach towards playing a man, and fully inhabited the part in a way that continues to impress twenty-five years after it was filmed. She’s never quite gotten out of the habit of playing men — her most recent memorable role was as the putatively male "Management" in the ambitious HBO failure Carnivalé — but she’s turned in plenty of terrific performances, in the intervening years, in her native gender. As the years go by, roles in animation and video games — the boon of the contemporary character actor, and a natural for someone with as distinctive a voice as Hunt’s — have become more common. But a woman with talents this prodigious, however small a package contains them, has got at least a few great big-screen roles left in her; maybe she’ll become the first person to win Academy Awards for both genders.

Where to see Linda Hunt at her best:

POPEYE (1980)

The first of several films she made with auteur Robert Altman, Popeye was Linda Hunt’s film debut. An underrated movie in its day that still hasn’t enjoyed the critical reappraisal it deserves, Popeye made brilliant use of character actors playing to E.C. Segar’s broad physical types and absurdist Yiddish humor; Hunt was perfect in both physique and temperament for the role of Mrs. Oxheart, the screeching, miniscule mother of the gargantuan prizefighter Oxblood Oxheart.

SILVERADO (1985)

Lawrence Kasdan’s rollicking western adventure is part revisionism and part tradition, a would-be-hip reinvention of the mythos that likewise plays as a goofy throwback to the old days. In a cast that features John Cleese, Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, Scott Glenn and an unusually animated Kevin Costner, it’s hard to stand out, but Linda Hunt, as saloon operator Stella, manages to steal the whole show, getting off half the movie’s good lines and holding her own against some of the most happily hammy performances in the movie.

PRÊT-À-PORTER (1994)

As big a fan as I am of Robert Altman — indeed, of Robert Altman’s lesser-known films — even I can’t say that Prêt-à-Porter, his ensemble comedy-drama about the world of high fashion, was one of his better efforts. (It didn’t help its commercial success much that no one could pronounce its name, either.) Like Kansas City, it comes off as one of the well-intentioned failures he produced before his late 1990s resurgence. Still, it features some game performances, not the least of which is Linda Hunt's, as the bitchy fashion editor Regina Krumm.

— Leonard Pierce
+ DIGG + DEL.ICIO.US + REDDIT
Posted Oct 31 2007, 04:00 PM
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