Helen Hunt

Helen Elizabeth Hunt (born June 15, 1963) is an American actress and director.

Her accolades include an Academy Award, four Primetime Emmy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards.

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

Her early roles included an appearance as Murray Slaughter's daughter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the chapter called “Murray Ghost for Ted” on, February 19, 1977, as the daughter of George Segal's main character in Rollercoaster (1977), alongside Lindsay Wagner in an episode of The Bionic Woman, an appearance in an episode of Ark II called "Omega", and a regular role in the television series The Swiss Family Robinson.

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

By the mid and late 1980s, Hunt had begun appearing in studio films aimed at a teenage audience.

In 1982, 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 (a scene which she mocked during a Saturday Night Live monologue in 1994), and she was cast on the ABC sitcom It Takes Two, which lasted only one season.

In 1983, she starred in Bill: On His Own, with Mickey Rooney and played Tami Maida in the fact-based production Quarterback Princess; both were made-for television films.

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

Her first major film role was that of a punk rock girl in the sci-fi film Trancers (1984).

She played the friend of an army brat in the comedy Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985), 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 (1986), alongside Kathleen Turner.

In 1987, 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 1988, she appeared in Stealing Home, as Hope Wyatt, the sister of Billy Wyatt, played by Mark Harmon and a cast featuring Jodie Foster and Harold Ramis.

Next of Kin (1989) featured her as the pregnant wife of a respectable lawman, opposite Patrick Swayze and Liam Neeson.

In 1990, 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, Hunt starred in Trancers II, the direct-to-video sequel to Trancers (1984), and played the lead female role in the sitcom My Life and Times, which only aired for 6 episodes.

Hunt rose to fame portraying newlywed Jamie Buchman in the sitcom Mad About You (1992–1999), which earned her three Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress and four Primetime Emmy Awards for Lead Actress.

In 1992, she would appear in the drama The Waterdance as a married woman having an affair with a writer; in the harem comedy Only You, as a travel agent and the love interest of a doll's house designer; in the mockumentary Bob Roberts, as Rose Pondell, a field reporter at WLNO; and in Mr. Saturday Night, as a young agent named Annie Well.

In 1992, 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.

Hunt came to prominence in North America with the sitcom Mad About You (1992–99), in which she starred opposite Paul Reiser, as a public relations specialist and one half of a couple in NYC.

In 1995, 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.

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

For the show's final season, Reiser and Hunt received $1 million ($0 million today) per episode.

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

In the disaster action film Twister (1996), Hunt starred with Bill Paxton as storm chasers researching tornadoes.

Both actors were temporarily blinded by bright electronic lamps halfway through filming, and needed hepatitis shots after shooting in a particularly unsanitary ditch.

Twister was the second-highest-grossing film of 1996, behind Independence Day.

The film sold an estimated 54,688,100 tickets in the US.

Hunt won the Academy Award for Best Actress for starring as a single mother in the romantic comedy film As Good as It Gets (1997), and established a film career by starring in Twister (1996), Cast Away (2000), What Women Want (2000), and Pay It Forward (2000).

Her other notable films include Bobby (2006), Soul Surfer (2011), and The Miracle Season (2018), and she has directed the film Ride (2014), and episodes of television series, including House of Lies in 2016, This Is Us in 2016, Feud: Bette and Joan in 2017, American Housewife in 2018, and the premiere episode of the Mad About You revival in 2019.

Helen Hunt was born in Culver City, California.

Her mother, Jane Elizabeth (née Novis), worked as a photographer, and her father, Gordon Hunt, was a film, voice and stage director and acting coach.

Her uncle, Peter H. Hunt, was also a director.

Her maternal grandmother, Dorothy (Anderson) Fries, was a voice coach.

Hunt's paternal grandmother was from a German-Jewish family, while Hunt's other grandparents were of English descent (her maternal grandfather was born in England), with a Methodist religious background.

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

Hunt graduated from Providence High School in Burbank, California.

She also studied ballet, and briefly attended the University of California, Los Angeles.

Hunt made her directorial film debut with Then She Found Me (2007).

For her portrayal of Cheryl Cohen-Greene in The Sessions (2012), she gained a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.