Kim Hunter
Motion Pictures Category Star
- Ceremony was on February 8, 1960
Kim Hunter
Television Category Star
- Ceremony was on February 8, 1960
Kim Hunter
Actress Kim Hunter dead of heart attack
To some, she was unforgettable as Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire. To others, Kim Hunter will forever be remembered as Zira, the ape.
The actress, who won a supporting Oscar in 1951 for her Desire role and who appeared in three Planet of the Apes movies, died Wednesday in her Greenwich Village apartment from an apparent heart attack. She was 79.
A shy, modest person, Hunter enjoyed a long and busy career in theater and television, less so in films, partly because she was blacklisted in the 1950s during the McCarthy era. A liberal Democrat, Hunter was named as a communist sympathizer by Red Channels, a pamphlet that influenced hiring by studios and TV networks.
She returned to films in 1964's Lilith, with Warren Beatty, Jean Seberg and Peter Fonda. Four years later she starred in Planet of the Apes, which cast Hunter as Dr. Zira, a chimpanzee psychiatrist. The actress spent hours in the makeup chair.
"It was pretty claustrophobic and painful to a certain extent," she told a reporter in 1998. "The only thing of me that came through was my eyeballs."
Nevertheless, she appeared in two sequels, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) and Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971).
Hunter was married to William Baldwin in 1944; they had a daughter, Kathryn, and divorced in 1946. In 1951, Hunter married actor and producer Robert Emmett, who died in 2000. Their son, Sean, is a musician. Kathryn is a judge in Connecticut.
