Holly Hunter (born March 20, 1958) is an American actress and producer. For her performance as Ada McGrath in the 1993 film The Piano, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, AACTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama, and the Cannes Best Actress Award. She was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for Broadcast News (1987), and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for The Firm (1993) and Thirteen (2003).
A seven-time Emmy Award nominee, Hunter won Emmys for Roe vs. Wade (1989) and The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom (1993). She also starred in the TNT drama series Saving Grace (2007–10). Her other film roles include Raising Arizona (1987), Always (1989), Copycat (1995), Crash (1996), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), The Incredibles (2004), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and The Big Sick (2017).
Holly Hunter talks about her film and TV career with such a casual, I-can’t-believe-I’m-still-working attitude, that you almost forget just how damn good she is. Almost. From her breakout role as a baby-crazy cop in the Coen Brothers’ sweetly absurd Raising Arizona to, more than 30 years later, her Independent Spirit–nominated turn as a mother fighting for her comatose daughter in The Big Sick, Hunter, 59, has defied the gloomy cliché that compelling roles for female actors only evaporate over time.
The four-time Oscar nominee and winner (for her lead role in Jane Campion’s stunning 1993 film The Piano) and six-time Emmy nominee sat down with Vulture in Los Angeles last November for a live SAG-AFTRA Conversations event, and again in February, to discuss her return to TV in Alan Ball’s new HBO drama Here and Now, how the seeds of her love affair with acting were planted while growing up in Georgia, and why she never wants her face to be a source of mystery. “I don’t want anyone to ever wonder who I am,” she says. “I’m not interested in fooling people.”I want to connect with desire, loss, need, fear, love, and rejection. I feel privileged that The Big Sick connected with an audience. That’s all you want as an actor and it’s all you want as an audience member, too. To have that hook up, you know? It’s cool to think that I’ve put in almost 40 years in an industry. There’s something durable about my career that I’m very pleased with. It’s like, “Wow, how lovely. How nice.”
