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Please, please; work, work. Hunt suggests the schoolgirl who always has her hand raised. In reality, she attended UCLA for, oh, about a day, but in her work she is a brilliant student--and a grind. To prepare for the role in As Good As It Gets, she spent time with a mother caring for a sick child, studied with an accent guru, picked over clothing to make sure it was nondescript enough and, as she always does, wrote in her journals, which by now must be more voluminous than Remembrance of Things Past. "I even treated Twister like Shakespeare," she says. "I researched it psychologically and meteorologically. I visited the National Severe Storm Labs in Oklahoma." Somebody said her character was as obsessed with tornadoes as Ahab was with a certain whale--so "I read a Jungian analysis of Moby Dick."
Hunt is readier to describe her bedtime reading than to discuss who might be listening if she were to read out loud. Her beau is Hank Azaria, the almost unfairly gifted comic actor who played the hunky maid Agador in The Birdcage, provided the cunningly cringing voice for Bartok the bat in Anastasia and inhabits more than a dozen regular characters on The Simpsons (including Moe the bartender, Chief Wiggum and Kwik-E Mart owner Apu Nahasapeemapetilan). He is also Nat, the sweet-souled dog walker on Mad About You. Azaria, 33, and Hunt have resolved not to speak publicly of their relationship.
Yet when the actress talks about the encroachments of a successful career on the rest of her life, she suggests one-half of a conversation that any 34-year-old woman might have with her best man on a nagging, looming topic: What next?
"The truth of it is, I have been working quietly on balance, trying to have a personal life," she says. "I want to pursue this ever growing thing called my career. At the same time, I look at women with children, and I think, 'Who am I kidding?' What I'm doing is kindergarten compared to that. That's when it gets real. Until that happens, I'm in training." She is aware of the dilemma. "I know women who gave it all up to have kids, and it wasn't right. I know women who went off to work--and that wasn't right. That's the messy unanswered question for me, and I feel small in the face of it. I have a friend who says you just have to grab a bigger racquet and rush the net. So that's what I'm trying to do."
Plates spinning, clocks ticking, net rushing. Hunt is as busy as any modern career woman, and as pensive about her genetic legacy. As surrogate friends, we wish her happiness. But we also hope she doesn't mind staying in the limelight for a few more years. Hollywood needs someone like Hunt, an actress who is both glamorous and grounded, to be a star. The industry's variety, if not its vitality, depends on crowd-pleasing performers with a wide range of personalities. And at least a few of them ought to be women. Hunt might have a chance to define feminism, and redefine femininity, for a more mature movie audience--and, by her success, get different kinds of good movies made. Maybe another nice romantic comedy like As Good As It Gets.
Jim Brooks thinks Hunt has "the whole package." He cites Katharine Hepburn, an actress equally adept in comedy and drama, a beauty who could play heiress or spinster. Says Brooks: "Helen just might have those chops too."