36 Facts About Helen Hunt

Helen Elizabeth Hunt was born on June 15,1963 and is an American actress and director.

Helen Hunt is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, four Primetime Emmy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards.

In 1997 Helen Hunt won the Academy Award for Best Actress for starring as Carol Connelly in the romantic comedy As Good as It Gets, while her portrayal of Cheryl Cohen-Greene in The Sessions, gained her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Helen Hunt made her directorial film debut with Then She Found Me, and has directed the film Ride, and episodes of television series, including House of Lies, This Is Us, Feud: Bette and Joan, American Housewife, and the premiere episode of the Mad About You revival.

Helen Hunt's mother, Jane Elizabeth, worked as a photographer, and her father, Gordon Hunt, was a film, voice and stage director and acting coach.

Helen Hunt's maternal grandmother, Dorothy Fries, was a voice coach.

When she was three, Helen Hunt's family moved to New York City, where her father directed theatre and Helen Hunt attended plays as a child several times a week.

Helen Hunt studied ballet, and briefly attended the University of California, Los Angeles.

Helen Hunt began working as a child actress in the 1970s.

Helen Hunt appeared as a marijuana-smoking classmate on an episode of The Facts of Life.

In 1982, Helen Hunt played a young woman who, while on PCP, jumps out of a second-story window, in a made-for-television film called Desperate Lives, and she was cast on the ABC sitcom It Takes Two, which lasted only one season.

Helen Hunt had a recurring role on St Elsewhere as Clancy Williams, the girlfriend of Jack "Boomer" Morrison, and had a notable guest appearance as a cancer-stricken mother-to-be in a two-part episode of Highway to Heaven.

Helen Hunt played the friend of an army brat in the comedy Girls Just Want to Have Fun, with Sarah Jessica Parker and Shannen Doherty, and appeared as the daughter of a woman on the verge of divorce in Francis Ford Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married, alongside Kathleen Turner.

In 1987, Helen Hunt starred with Matthew Broderick in Project X, as a graduate student assigned to care for chimpanzees used in a secret Air Force project.

In 1990, Helen Hunt appeared with Tracey Ullman and Morgan Freeman in a Wild West version of The Taming of the Shrew, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.

In 1991, Helen Hunt starred in Trancers II, the direct-to-video sequel to Trancers, and played the lead female role in the sitcom My Life and Times, which only aired for 6 episodes.

In 1992, Helen Hunt returned for her fourth and final outing as Lena in Trancers III, the second sequel of the Trancers series including Trancers 1.5, which was among her five film releases that year.

Helen Hunt came to prominence in North America with the sitcom Mad About You, in which she starred opposite Paul Reiser, as a public relations specialist and one half of a couple in NYC.

Helen Hunt went on to win Emmy Awards for her performances in 1996,1997,1998, and 1999.

Helen Hunt directed several episodes of Mad About You, including the series finale.

In 1995, Helen Hunt played the wife of an ex-con living in Queens, alongside Nicolas Cage, in Kiss of Death, a very loosely based remake of the 1947 film noir classic of the same name.

Helen Hunt went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress in the romantic comedy As Good as It Gets, in which she took on the role of a waitress and single mother who finds herself falling in love with a misanthropic, obsessive-compulsive romance novelist, played by Jack Nicholson.

Nonetheless, Helen Hunt was Nicholson's perfect counterpart, and delivered "a simply stunning performance", wrote critic Louise Keller.

In What Women Want, Helen Hunt starred with Mel Gibson as the co-worker and love interest of a Chicago executive, and in Cast Away, she portrayed the long-term girlfriend of a FedEx employee marooned on an uninhabited island, alongside Tom Hanks.

Helen Hunt starred in Woody Allen's The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, as an efficiency expert hypnotized by a crooked hypnotist into stealing jewels.

AV Club, in its review for the latter, remarked: "Helen Hunt looks embarrassingly out of place trying to play an infamous seductress".

Helen Hunt played a socialite, as part of an ensemble cast, in Emilio Estevez's drama Bobby, about the hours leading up to the Robert F Kennedy assassination.

Helen Hunt made her feature film directorial debut in Then She Found Me, in which she starred as a 39-year-old Brooklyn elementary school teacher, who after years is contacted by the flamboyant host of a local talk show, played by Bette Midler, who introduces herself as her biological mother.

Helen Hunt starred in the dramedy Every Day, as one half of a married couple pulled apart by increasing responsibilities.

Helen Hunt played research geneticist Mary-Claire King in the independent drama Decoding Annie Parker, which was released to a mixed critical response.

Helen Hunt wrote and directed the drama Ride, in which she starred as a mother who travels cross-country to California to be with her son after he decides to drop out of school and become a surfer.

In 2019, Helen Hunt appeared in the BBC series World on Fire as journalist Nancy Campbell, a character inspired by real-life war correspondent Clare Hollingworth, and reprised the role of Jamie Buchman in the Mad About You revival, which premiered in the form of a limited series, by Spectrum Originals.

In 2020, Helen Hunt appeared in the crime drama film The Night Clerk alongside Tye Sheridan.

In December 2020, it was reported that Helen Hunt would appear in a leading role in the Starz series Blindspotting, created by Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal and based on their 2018 film of the same name.

In 2001, Helen Hunt began a relationship with producer Matthew Carnahan.

Helen Hunt was one of the demonstrators at the 2017 Women's March held on January 21 in Los Angeles, California.