Marsha Hunt, film star blacklisted for HUAC protest, dies at 104
Roger Memos, the writer-director of the documentary movie “Marsha Hunt’s Candy Adversity” (2015), confirmed the loss of life however didn’t know the rapid trigger.
Few performers had a extra auspicious starting. After a quick modeling profession in Manhattan, Ms. Hunt headed to Hollywood at 17 on the suggestion of an admiring photographer who intuited her future in movie and orchestrated a ruse to pique the curiosity of film studios.
A photograph of her was despatched to each paper in Los Angeles with textual content about how the radiant cowl woman was turning down many studio presents. Of films, she was quoted: “No photos for me.”
The intrigue labored, touchdown her a contract at Paramount studios and the romantic lead in her first movie, “The Virginia Decide” (1935), reverse Robert Cummings. Together with her heart-shaped face and healthful attract, Ms. Hunt was forged in additional than a dozen movies in her first two years on-screen — some reverse John Wayne and Buster Crabbe. Few had been distinguished sufficient to catapult her to cinematic heights.
Ms. Hunt mentioned she begged studio executives to finish her run of dewy-eyed coeds and romance-minded ingénues and provides her a greater vary of elements, even when it meant a drop from marquee billing. She mentioned Paramount officers advised her she appeared ungrateful, given her stardom. After her contract expired, she grew to become a prodigious freelancer, typically at low-budget “poverty row” studios.
“I used to be 20 years outdated then and I used to be a has-been as a result of I had solely performed candy younger ladies,” she told the publication Movie Discuss in 2004. “I took something I may get, simply to maintain busy,” she added. “I labored at studios that made photos — and I imply entire characteristic movies — in six days.”
A small position within the common Andy Hardy sequence — as a spendthrift spouse in “The Hardys Experience Excessive” (1939) — led to a contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, essentially the most prestigious studio on the town.
Ms. Hunt grew to become certainly one of MGM’s most dependable and interesting stalwarts of second-tier options. In “Kid Glove Killer” (1942), a taut suspense movie with light-comedy components, she performed a fetching assistant to Van Heflin’s forensic scientist. She was Robert Younger’s warmhearted spouse in “Joe Smith, American” (1942) and courageous pilot Franchot Tone’s sweetheart within the wartime propaganda movie “Pilot #5” (1943).
She additionally received supporting roles in A-list productions together with “Pleasure and Prejudice” (1940) starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, “The Human Comedy” (1943) with Mickey Rooney, and “The Valley of Choice” (1945) with Gregory Peck and Garson.
“I didn’t care about billing,” Ms. Hunt advised Movie Discuss. “I didn’t care about being the lead, fame or something like that. I didn’t wish to be a star: I needed to be the very best actress I may presumably turn out to be they usually had been letting me develop with each position.”
Along with her display work, Ms. Hunt additionally grew to become identified for her volunteer actions elevating morale and funds for the Allied struggle effort in World Warfare II. She launched into a USO tour of Canada and Alaska, offered struggle bonds and have become captain of a crew of hostesses on the Hollywood Canteen, which catered to servicemen on depart. “I believe I danced with 5 thousand males each Saturday evening,” she later mentioned.
Her profession waned after the struggle. In a small position, she was forged towards sort — as a vamp — in “Smash-Up: The Story of a Lady” (1947) starring Susan Hayward as an alcoholic chanteuse. Ms. Hunt additionally had the dangerous luck of being the great woman within the crime drama “Raw Deal” (1948).
She turned efficiently to TV and Broadway to spice up her profile and reveal what Hollywood had failed to completely seize of her vary. Reviewing her work as Viola in an NBC manufacturing of “Twelfth Evening” in 1949, New York Instances TV critic Jack Gould praised her understated charisma and mastery of creating Shakespeare’s couplets sound effortlessly conversational.
Her work as a parson’s spouse reverse Maurice Evans in a well-received 1950 revival of George Bernard Shaw’s “The Satan’s Disciple” landed her on the cover of Life journal — a significant publicity coup. Her timing was unlucky. Her title additionally appeared quickly after in Purple Channels, a pamphlet that stoked anti-communist paranoia and had great affect over the hiring choices of TV and movie studios.
Probably the most critical cost, Purple Channels famous, was Ms. Hunt’s membership within the Committee for the First Modification. This group of about two dozen high-profile entertainers, together with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, flew to Washington in 1947 to protest the imprisonment of 10 noted writers, directors and producers for contempt of Congress for refusing to disclose their political allegiances to the Home Un-American Actions Committee.
Many years later, she recalled the HUAC inquest as “an appalling show of the denial of residents’ rights.” It was an period when livelihoods had been destroyed by innuendo about fealty to Moscow, and whereas she was by no means jailed or charged with any crime, she discovered that work was drying up. She advised the New York Herald Tribune in 1956 that she twice signed anti-communist loyalty oaths to acquire jobs in movie and TV however that she drew the road at taking out an commercial in commerce papers.
“I’ve been up for a number of photos, but it surely’s fairly an unyielding wall,” she mentioned to the Herald Tribune. “The worth of labor at this time is guilt and repentance. I’m not responsible so I can’t repent. If solely I had been a Communist, I may have joined with the opposite prodigal little kids and would have been welcomed again into the fold.”
Marcia Virginia Hunt was born in Chicago on Oct. 17, 1917, to an insurance coverage firm government and a voice trainer. She grew up in New York, the place she developed an curiosity in appearing in grade faculty. After graduating at 16 from the Horace Mann Excessive College for Ladies, she grew to become a John Powers mannequin to subsidize her drama lessons.
Her first marriage, to Paramount movie editor and future director Jerry Hopper, led to divorce. She was then married to screenwriter Robert Presnell Jr. from 1946 till his loss of life in 1986. Her stepson, Peter Presnell, died in 2020. She had no rapid survivors.
Ms. Hunt labored periodically after the blacklist period — notably because the mom of a disfigured struggle veteran in “Johnny Received His Gun” (1971) — however she mentioned the “momentum” to her display profession was gone.
She gravitated to activism, propelled by a two-month around-the-world journey within the mid-Fifties. Being uncovered to what she referred to as the “extremes of magnificence and splendor and . . . the squalor of abject poverty” spurred her involvement with the American Affiliation for the United Nations. (The group helps the world physique and is now referred to as the United Nations Affiliation of america of America.)
As president of the San Fernando Valley chapter, she raised cash and served as an impassioned voice on meals insecurity, refugee crises and different humanitarian issues. After a home made bomb destroyed the workplace in 1963 — a part of a sample of comparable terrorist assaults aimed on the U.N. group and interfaith officers within the space — she spoke out towards right-wing extremism. Many years later, she labored on assuaging homelessness within the Los Angeles space.
She was seldom extra expressive than when discussing a life spent pushing again towards authority.
Recalling her blacklisting, she advised Movie Discuss: “I used to be advised that actually it wasn’t actually about communism — that was the factor that frightened everyone — it was about management and about energy.
“The way in which you get management,” she continued, “is to get everybody to agree with no matter is correct on the time, no matter is accepted. Don’t query something, don’t converse out, don’t have your personal concepts, don’t be articulate about it, don’t ever be eloquent, and when you ever be a type of issues, you’re controversial. And that’s simply as dangerous, perhaps worse, than being a communist.”
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