Kim Hunter
Two roles, seventeen years apart, hold the public memory: Stella Kowalski and a chimpanzee scientist called Zira. Hunter, who lived from 1922 to 2002, originated Stella in the first stage production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and played her again in the 1951 film, winning both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.
Stella is the harder part in that play and the least fashionable: she is the one who stays, and Hunter played the staying as an appetite rather than a weakness, which is what keeps the film from turning into a simple moral arrangement. That refusal to plead for a character runs through her whole filmography. The earliest credit here, The Seventh Victim in 1943, asks her to be sensible inside something genuinely strange, and A Matter of Life and Death in 1946 puts her opposite a fantasy conceit she plays completely straight.
Then Planet of the Apes in 1968, where she gave Zira warmth, curiosity and irritation through a full prosthetic face, in three films across four years. It is a proper piece of acting under conditions designed to make acting impossible, and it made her recognisable to an audience that had never seen her on stage.
She kept working in television and in odd corners of horror for decades after, from The Kindred to Two Evil Eyes, with a late appearance in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Movies (18)
- Planet of the Apes (1968)
- A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
- Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)
- Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)
- Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)
- A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
- The Seventh Victim (1943)
- Born Innocent (1976)
- Two Evil Eyes (1990)
- The Swimmer (1968)
- The Kindred (1987)
- Lilith (1964)
- Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There (2003)
- Deadline - U.S.A. (1952)
- Bad Ronald (1974)
- Bermuda Affair (1956)
- Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024)
- Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff (2010)
TV (6)
Where to start with Kim Hunter
Start where she started: A Streetcar Named Desire. Hunter had already played Stella on stage for years by the time the camera arrived, and it shows in how little she does.
Then Planet of the Apes, for the opposite reason. Everything has to arrive through the eyes and the voice, and she gets more feeling out of Zira than the script supplies, which is why the two sequels here, Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Escape from the Planet of the Apes, kept bringing the character back. A Matter of Life and Death is the most beautiful film in her list and worth going out of your way for. For the strange stuff, The Seventh Victim is an early low-budget mood piece that has aged far better than its reputation, and The Swimmer and Lilith are both bruised, adult sixties dramas where she does a great deal with very little screen time.