Holly Hunter (born March 20, 1958, Conyers, Georgia, U.S.) is an American actress with a talent for portraying intense, driven, and often offbeat characters in both comedies and dramas.
Hunter had her first acting experience while she was still in elementary school. She joined her high school’s drama club and performed in summer stock before studying drama at Carnegie Mellon University (B.F.A., 1980). She then moved to New York City, where she became acquainted with the playwright Beth Henley. Although Hunter’s first professional appearance was in a bit part in the low-budget horror film The Burning (1981), she quickly developed a reputation as an interpreter of roles in Henley’s plays, acting in Crimes of the Heart (1981; Hunter’s Broadway debut), The Wake of Jamey Foster (1982), and The Miss Firecracker Contest (1984). In addition to her stage work, she played small roles in a few television movies as well as in Jonathan Demme’s 1984 film Swing Shift, and that same year she was an uncredited telephone voice in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Blood Simple.
Hunter starred opposite Nicolas Cage in the Coen brothers’ comedy Raising Arizona (1987) and, in a breakthrough performance, played news producer Jane Craig in James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News (1987). Hunter’s role in the film, which also starred William Hurt and Albert Brooks, earned her a Silver Bear for best actress at the Berlin International Film Festival and nominations for the Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for best actress. In 1989 Hunter recreated the lead role in Miss Firecracker, the film version of Henley’s play. She was again nominated for a Golden Globe for her portrayal of a character based on the real-life Norma McCorvey in the TV movie Roe vs. Wade (1989). She played opposite Richard Dreyfuss in Steven Spielberg’s romance Always (1989) and in Lasse Hallström’s Once Around (1991), and she starred with Gena Rowlands and Bill Pullman in the 1992 TV movie Crazy in Love.
Hunter received an Emmy Award as well as a third Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of the title character in the 1993 TV movie The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom. She was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress for her performance in Sydney Pollack’s thriller The Firm (1993). Hunter’s vivid rendering of the inner life of a mute Scottish pianist who moves to New Zealand with her young daughter (played by Anna Paquin) for an arranged marriage in Jane Campion’s period romance The Piano (also 1993) earned her an Oscar for best actress in addition to a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe Award. Her later movies included the thriller Copycat and Jodie Foster’s Home for the Holidays (both 1995), Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary (1997), and the romance Living Out Loud (1998).
In 2000 Hunter played Penny, the wife of George Clooney’s character, in the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? and won an Emmy nomination for her starring role in the TV movie Harlan County War. She was nominated again for her portrayal of tennis player Billie Jean King in the 2001 television film When Billie Beat Bobby. Hunter played the mother of a troubled teenager in Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen (2003) and was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actress for her performance. She voiced Elastigirl in the popular animated feature The Incredibles (2004) and its sequel, Incredibles 2 (2018).
Hunter earned nominations for both a Golden Globe (2008) and an Emmy (2009) for her starring role in the TV drama series Saving Grace (2007–10). She later appeared in the superhero movie Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and won praise for her performance in Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick (2017). Hunter then returned to television for the HBO series Here and Now (2018), a drama about a multiracial family, and in 2019 she had a recurring role in another HBO show, Succession, about a family that owns a global media empire. The following year she appeared in the Showtime miniseries The Comey Rule, which was based on the memoir of the former FBI director. Hunter was then cast as the deputy and rival of the title character in Mr. Mayor, a sitcom that debuted in 2021.