Oscar-winning actress Kim Hunter, who played everything from Marlon Brando’s betrayed wife to an ape-woman psychologist in a career spanning more than 50 years, died Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 79.
Her death was discovered by a visiting nurse, according to her agent, Lionel Larner. “She had been in failing health in the last months,” Larner said.
Ms. Hunter was best-known for two roles that could not have been more different. In her Broadway debut in 1947, she played Stella Kowalski opposite Brando’s brutish Stanley in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.” She won an Oscar for best supporting actress when she repeated the role in the film version in 1951.
But she may be most known to modern movie audiences for the role she created in 1968, under a face full of latex makeup that took four hours to apply: that of the compassionate and rational simian Dr. Zira in “Planet of the Apes.” Ms. Hunter repeated her role in two more films, “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” (1970) and “Escape from the Planet of the Apes” (1971).
“It was pretty claustrophobic and painful to a certain extent,” she said years later. Still, Ms. Hunter liked the role, liked the series and, above all, liked acting.
Born Janet Cole on Nov. 12, 1922, in Detroit, she grew up in Miami Beach and made her stage debut at age 17.
“I knew from my teens on that [acting] was my profession,” she recalled. “I took classes in metal craft in high school so I couldn’t be talked into going to college.” But she was a product of New York’s Actors Studio.
Despite her success, Ms. Hunter was blacklisted by Hollywood as a communist sympathizer for several years in the 1950s, partly because of the perceived pro-Soviet stance of her second film, “Tender Comrade,” with Ginger Rogers, and partly because of her strong support of civil rights.
Still, she had a solid career on Broadway and in movies. Her last film role was in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” in 1997.
