(2 of 2)
She has been going since she started, the youngest of seven children on a beef and hay farm in the Atlanta suburbs. "The house is real sequestered away from people," says Hunter in a lilting twang punctuated by the occasional dadgummit. "The farm isn't groomed -- there's a kind of wildness to the place. It's beautiful, a little Nirvana down there." Holly was the willful tomboy. "My father did not approve of my learning to drive a tractor," she says, "which is probably why I'm so stubborn. He made the rules, and I broke them. But, like everyone who grows up on a farm, I got a working knowledge of life and death and what goes on in between. Cats get bitten by snakes, dogs get run over -- and then a calf is born. It's healthy to see the life cycle going on around you."
Holly began acting in the ninth grade because "the people who were involved in this drama stuff seemed like a pretty happening group. The teacher seemed real fun. So I signed up." After four years in the theater program at Carnegie-Mellon University, Hunter hit New York City. One day, hurrying to audition for a Beth Henley play, she met the author in a stalled elevator, and a few weeks later Henley signed Hunter to replace Mary Beth Hurt in Crimes of the Heart on Broadway. "She picks up a script of mine, and it becomes alive," says Henley. "Holly and I share a Southern sensibility: that joyous- despairing view of life."
These days, Hunter has little reason to despair, and no time for a penciled- in cry. In Raising Arizona she earned the usual critical raves as canny, resilient Ed McDonnough, lullabying her purloined baby to sleep with a grotesquely poignant backwoods ballad. (Holly chose the Charlie Monroe song herself.) She is happy to keep her private life -- which she shares with Photographer John Raffo -- private. And Hunter, whose goal was always "to be one of the really respected stage actresses," doesn't mind juggling her newfound fame with rehearsals for a Los Angeles production of Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind. She still loves the stage: "It's so enticing and dangerous. It's human. It might be a bad night, or it might be magic, electrifying, unforgettable." The lure of movie stardom goes both ways too. When Holly Hunter's around, you can bet on magic.