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Hearing these testimonials, a skeptical journalist is tempted to set up an 800 hot line for anyone with an unkind word to say about the actress, anonymity guaranteed. But there may be more urgent Hollywood news about Hunt. Yes, she's now a big star, winner of Emmy, Golden Globe and MTV Movie awards. But on the evidence, she is also a caring, clever person who loves her folks and her shaggy Samoyed dog Johnny, belongs to no cult, lives in the unchic San Fernando Valley, drives a boring black Volvo sedan, loves opera, listens to the dictates of her conscience, hears the ticking of her biological clock, protects her privacy as you would if you were famous and shrugs off her exhausting TV-and-movie workload--she made As Good As It Gets and a season of Mad About You simultaneously--by saying, "I'm cursed, or blessed, to be able to do more than one thing at a time. To keep the plates spinning."
Hunt proves that a performer can do fine work and lots of it, be respected for what she does and loved for who she is, without falling victim to the excesses of sex, drugs and lock-'er-up. Shouldn't that be worth just one tabloid headline? NORMAL WOMAN CONQUERS SHOW BIZ!
Hunt's triumph is more imposing in that she is a survivor of the frail, often self-lacerating community of child actors. This is not a star-is-born story but a star-is-grown one; she has spent nearly three-quarters of her life in front of footlights and cameras. At 34, Hunt is celebrating her silver anniversary in acting.
She was born in Culver City, Calif., just a few blocks from the lot where Mad About You is filmed. But as an infant, Helen moved to Manhattan with her parents, director Gordon Hunt and Jane, a photographer. "I wasn't that movie-obsessed," Helen recalls. "We were at the theater all the time." For years she was just another out-of-work actress taking classes and studying her craft. Then she turned nine and got a job, as the blond pioneer girl in the 1973 TV movie Pioneer Woman. Even then, Helen had the mile-high forehead, perfect oval face and watchful stillness of a Vermeer maiden. "It was very strange," she says. "Somebody forgot to tell me I was a kid. In Pioneer Woman, I was trying to play Sophie's Choice."
At 11, Helen joined Jessica Walter on the Amy Prentiss sleuth series; a year later, she was a regular on Swiss Family Robinson. And the roles kept rolling in. "We made a deal," Gordon Hunt recalls. "She could work as long as she had a B average. With most kids, if they get a B, you promise them a vacation. With Helen, if she got a B, she got to work. Work was her playtime. I could see there was a really mature soul in there." Casting directors noticed the same thing: Helen had not a sexual but an emotional, intellectual precocity. "I would cry," she notes, "because I didn't get the girlfriend or Brat Pack parts. People said, 'She seems too mature, too knowing.' Well, what could I do about that?"
The answer: just wait. "Helen's an old soul," says her manager and business partner, Connie Tavel, who met Hunt 15 years ago on a women's baseball team. (Typically, Hunt worked so hard honing her skills as a second baseman that at season's end, she was voted "most improved player.") "She was never an ingenue. Now she's growing into her old self. The part of her that kept her from roles at 19 has given her balance and success at 34."