Helen Hunt made her splash in the mid-1990s with the NBC series Mad About You, a kind of homage to late-baby-boom couplehood. After appearing in several TV roles in the '80s, she moved into feature films, including Francis Ford Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married (1986, with Nicolas Cage) and Bob Roberts (1992). Her success on TV in the '90s led to higher profile movies, including a starring role in As Good As It Gets (1997, with Jack Nicholson), for which she won an Oscar. Her other films include Dr. T and the Women (2000, with Richard Gere), Cast Away (2000, with Tom Hanks), What Women Want (2000, with Mel Gibson) and Woody Allen's The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion (2001).
Hunt once appeared as Gavin MacLeod's daughter on TheMary Tyler MooreShow.
Career Highlights: Cast Away, Peggy Sue Got Married, The Waterdance
First Major Screen Credit: Pioneer Woman (1973)
Biography
A precociously talented youngster, Helen Hunt was drawing paychecks as a television actress from the age of ten. Before she was 17, she had appeared as a regular on two series, Swiss Family Robinson (1975) and The Fitzpatricks (1977). Hunt proved she was more than just a workaday child actor with her starring performance in the fact-based 1981 TV movie The Miracle of Kathy Miller, in which she played a high school athlete who overcame severe mental and physical damage brought on by a highway accident.
While she had been appearing in films as early as Rollercoaster in 1977, Hunt was never groomed as a star player, and it is possible that her resemblance to another child actress, Jodie Foster, held her back from more important roles.
After taking on her first adult role in the 1982 sitcom It Takes Two, Hunt's film assignments improved, with sizable roles in Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Project X (1987), Next of Kin (1989), and The Waterdance (1991). She also gained a small measure of cult status by appearing in a brace of science fiction films, including Trancers II (1991) and Trancers III (1992). That same year, Hunt landed her longest-lasting acting assignment to date, as the co-star of the Paul Reiser-created comedy series Mad About You. During the show's seven-year run, she won both Emmy and Golden Globe awards for her portrayal of Jamie Buchman. In 1996, Hunt had her most successful film role to date in the blockbuster Twister. The following year, she topped that when she received a Best Actress Oscar for playing a caring waitress and single mother who befriends acerbic, obsessive-compulsive author Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson, who also won an Oscar for his performance) in As Good As It Gets. After Mad About You ended in 1999, Hunt appeared in films by several veteran directors, including Robert Zemeckis (Cast Away [2000]), Robert Altman (Dr. T and The Women [2000]), and Woody Allen (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion [2001]). She starred in Life x 3 on Broadway in 2003. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
"I know for me the subject of how to be in a relationship is precious and complicated and challenging. It wouldn't be right to make it look too easy. [On her approach to Mad About You]"
Hunt began working in the 1970s as a child actress. Her early roles included an appearance as Murray Slaughter's daughter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, alongside Lindsay Wagner in an episode of The Bionic Woman, and a regular role in the television series The Swiss Family Robinson. She appeared as a marijuana-smoking classmate on an episode of The Facts of Life. She also appeared as a young woman who, while on PCP, jumps out of a second-story window in a 1982 after school special called Desperate Lives (a scene which she mocked during a Saturday Night Live monologue in 1994).[7] In the mid-1980s, she had a recurring role on St. Elsewhere as Clancy Williams, girlfriend of Dr. Jack "Boomer" Morrison. She remains best known for one of her earliest roles as Jennie in Bill: On His Own, costarring Mickey Rooney.
In the 1990s, after the lead female role in the short-lived My Life and Times, Hunt became well-known to television audiences in Mad About You, winning Emmy Awards for her performance in 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. Hunt has also had a successful film career, with roles in movies such as Cast Away and the 1996 blockbuster Twister.
Hunt is a director, having helmed several episodes of Mad About You, including the series finale. Her big-screen directorial debut came with the film Then She Found Me, in which she also starred.[1]
Hunt dated actorHank Azaria for five years, then was married to him from 1999 until 2000.[1] She briefly dated fellow actor Kevin Spacey in 2000.[9] She has been in a relationship with Matthew Carnahan since 2001 and they have a daughter, Makena Lei Gordon Carnahan, born in 2004.[1][10]
