Marsha Hunt, a person of the last surviving actors from Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s who labored with performers ranging from Laurence Olivier to Andy Griffith in a career disrupted for a time by the McCarthy-period blacklist, has died. She was 104.
Hunt, who appeared in much more than 100 videos and Tv set reveals, died Wednesday at her house in Sherman Oaks, California, claimed Roger Memos, the writer-director of the 2015 documentary “Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity.”
A Chicago native, she arrived in Hollywood in 1935 and about the future 15 many years appeared in dozens of movies, 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 perfectly beneath 40 when MGM named her “Hollywood’s Youngest Character Actress.” And by the early 1950s, she was sufficient of a star to seem on the include of Lifestyle journal and appear to be set to thrive in the new medium of tv when quickly “the work dried up,” she recalled in 1996.
The cause, she figured out from her agent, was that the communist-looking Red Channels publication had exposed that she attended a peace conference in Stockholm and other supposedly suspicious gatherings. Along with Hollywood stars Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart and Danny Kaye, Hunt also went to Washington in 1947 to protest the Home Un-American Pursuits Committee, which was conducting a witch hunt for communists in the film market.
“I’d designed 54 flicks in my first 16 a long time in Hollywood,” Hunt claimed in 1996. “In the past 45 a long time, I have designed eight. That shows what a blacklist can do to a profession.”
Hunt concentrated on the theater, in which the blacklist was not observed, till she started often obtaining film get the job done yet again in the late 1950s. She appeared in the touring providers of “The Cocktail Get together,” “The Lady’s Not for Burning” and “The Tunnel of Adore,” and on Broadway in “The Devil’s Disciple,” “Legend of Sarah″ and “The Paisley Convertible.”
Marcia Virginia Hunt (she altered the spelling of her 1st identify later) was born in Chicago and grew up in New York Metropolis, daughter of a lawyer-insurance policy government and a voice teacher. Slender and elegant, with a warm smile and massive, expressive eyes, Hunt researched drama and worked as a product ahead of building her movie debut.
An early marriage to director Jerry Hopper ended in divorce. In 1948 she married movie author Robert Presnell Jr., and they experienced one daughter, who died before long immediately after her untimely birth. Her spouse died in 1986.
Hunt’s first motion picture was 1935′s “The Virginia Choose.” She went on to engage in demure roles in a series of films for Paramount, which include “The Accusing Finger” and “Come on Leathernecks,” but, as she instructed The Associated Press in 2020, she was tired of “sweet younger things” and begged for much more substantial function.
Hollywood proved a unpleasant education. In “Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity,” she remembered pretty much acquiring the component of Melanie Wilkes in “Gone with the Wind,” even being certain by producer David O. Selznick. Inside of days, Olivia de Havilland was declared as the actor who would perform Melanie for the 1939 epic.
“That’s the day I grew up,” Hunt reported in the documentary. “That’s the working day I knew I could never have my heart broken once more by this career of acting.”
She still left Paramount for MGM close to the time of “Gone with the Wind” and experienced direct or supporting roles in “These Glamour Ladies,” “Flight Command” and “The Human Comedy” among the other movies.
“MGM was sheer magic,” she recalled in a 2007 Related Press interview. “When I arrived at the studio for a one-working day part, they parked my automobile. I went on the set and located a director’s chair with a indication on it, ‘Miss Hunt.’ A further indicator was on my dressing space.
“I reported to myself, ‘Any studio that treats a a single-day participant that way, actually understands how to make images.’ They won my loyalty.”
Function unraveled speedily right after she openly embraced liberal brings about, these types of as signing up for the 1947 protest versus congressional hearings on the reputed communist influence in Hollywood.
“I was under no circumstances a communist or even intrigued in the communist bring about,” she declared in 1996. “I was a political innocent defending my industry.”
With a few of exceptions, these as producer Stanley Kramer’s 1952 spouse and children comedy “The Content Time,” she was unseen on the big display for most of the 1950s. She afterwards appeared in several Tv set sequence, which include “My A few Sons,” “Matlock,” “All in the Family” and “Murder, She Wrote.”
She remained vigorous and stylish in aged age. In 1993, she place out “The Way We Wore: Styles of the 1930s and ’40s and Our Environment Considering that Then,” a lavishly illustrated guide of the fashions in the course of her Hollywood heyday.
A lifelong political activist, Hunt experienced a brush with terror in 1962 when she took section in a discussion board on appropriate-wing extremists and two other participants’ homes ended up ruined by selfmade bombs the extremely similar night.
“The ashen-confronted actress claimed her property most likely escaped the bomb attack only mainly because the terrorists were being unable to find out where by she lived,” the Los Angeles Periods documented. Police ended up sent to guard her household.
Extra a short while ago, she aided generate a refuge for the homeless in Los Angeles’ Sherman Oaks neighborhood, exactly where she lived and was feted with the title of honorary mayor.
Wanting again on her activist years, Hunt remarked in 1996: “I never ever craved an id as a figure of controversy. But possessing weathered it and observed other passions in the meantime, I can glance again with some philosophy.”
The late Involved Push author Bob Thomas contributed to this obituary.
