Remembering Marsha Hunt, the blacklisted beauty who battled back – Hartford Courant

Since 1946, actress Marsha Hunt lived in the same Sherman Oaks home where she died peacefully last week. She would have turned 105 next month.

While perhaps not remembered today as well as other lead actresses from Hollywood’s Golden Age, Hunt was enormously popular and productive early in her career, appearing in over 50 films throughout the 1930s and 40s.

Born in Chicago, the family soon moved to New York City. A bright and curious girl, young Marsha loved acting at school, church, and summer camps. After graduating from high school, she began her professional career with a prominent New York modeling agency before heading to Hollywood.

Within weeks of arriving on the West Coast, she secured a Paramount contract. Her first movie (“The Virginia Judge”) was quickly filmed and released in September 1935.

“It wasn’t about becoming a famous star,” Hunt told me from her home in 2014. “I just wanted the joy of pretending to be interesting characters and convincing audiences that I was.”

Hunt was soon assigned leading roles in numerous films, co-starring with icons of the day.

“I worked with John Wayne before he was an airport,” she said, referring to the many public locations now named after the legendary actor. The pair co-starred in “Born to the West” (reissued as “Hell Town”) in 1937, two years before Wayne became an overnight sensation in “Stagecoach.”

Hunt’s own film star status would have likely accelerated into the 50s and beyond, but politics interceded when relations between the studios and some actors took a dramatic dive in the late 40s as a wave of anticommunism paranoia swept the nation.

When a Congressional committee accused a group of writers of communistic affiliations, Hunt and others spoke out but found themselves vilified during the McCarthy-era Hollywood Blacklisting period.

“We called ourselves The Committee for the First Amendment, hired a plane, and flew to Washington in 1947 – the Bogarts, Danny Kaye, Paul Henreid, Ira Gershwin, and other actors, writers, producers, directors – to defend our industry and the maligned writers,” Hunt recalled.

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Rather than being hailed champions of free speech, Hunt and others who failed to repent their action were banned by the Hollywood studios.

“I was punished by being denied work by the industry I went to defend,” she recalled. “While it killed the momentum of my film career, I was determined to continue acting. Happily, Broadway opened up for me, then television, and eventually movies. But I was never again given film roles as richly challenging, or the same billing or salary. “

Beyond her acting, Hunt turned the professional negative into a personal positive, using her blacklisting experience to become a champion for social activism. After a world trip with her husband in 1955, she was touched by the hardships and poverty of other nations.

“I came back a different person,” she admitted. “I had been so focused on my acting and was now more aware of my fellow man. I wound up giving 25 years of my life to the United Nations to promote peace, progress, and unity.”

Hunt’s life story was the subject of a 2015 documentary, “Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity,” by Emmy Award-winning director Roger C. Memos (available on Amazon Prime and YouTube trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ6T-qlO7w4 ), the title being adapted from the line “sweet are the uses of adversity” in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” which the filmmakers felt summed up the peaks and valleys in Hunt’s personal life and career.

“I’m touched they wanted to tell my story,” Hunt told me after her involvement with the documentary. “I’ve had an interesting life with all the highs and lows.”

Nick Thomas teaches at Auburn University at Montgomery, Ala., and has written features, columns, and interviews for many magazines and newspapers. See www.getnickt.org