Nancy Miller, the creator of Saving Grace, notes that “Holly’s contributions are in every frame of our show. There is no shallow end of the pool for her. She dives into the very bottom and then digs through it in order to get to the truth of this moment, this scene, this emotion.”
One way Hunter likes to go deep is in “tone meetings,” where she, Miller and other members of the team convene to “go through the script line by line,” Hunter says. “We talk about everything: What are we going for? What’s the super-objective? Maybe it’s to forgive, or to surrender. It’s fascinating what we discover in these epic tone meetings. Our longest was 13 hours— we just extended it to the next day.”
Hunter’s attention to detail is legendary. For example, in the second season, it was her idea to try some braiding in Grace’s hair, adding a hint of Medusa to her character’s usual tight-blue-jeaned promiscuity. “I saw Grace in the act of braiding,” she says. “It’s a very old female gesture, an ancient decorative ritual.” Miller liked the concept and pretty soon, after contributions from Hunter’s hairdresser and the show’s costume designer, “I was discussing a case with feathers and 15 pairs of earrings in my hair. I love that; that’s my adventure.”
The youngest of seven children, Hunter was born in Conyers, Georgia, outside Atlanta. She loved growing up on a 250-acre farm (and regularly visits family still living there), but she has made no secret of the fact that her desire to essentially pretend for a living began with her feeling separate and apart from her roots. Her parents encouraged her penchant for performing, enrolling her in piano lessons. (Years later she would do her own playing in The Piano.) She appeared onstage for the first time in a fifth grade production, portraying Helen Keller, and in high school she got hooked on musicals. When it came time for college, she left the South, attending Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and majoring in drama. “I carry my Southernness with me,” she told the New York Times in 1993. “God knows, it’s a great place to come from. It’s also a place I had to get away from. It is just an endless world for me, so much culture and eccentricity.”
Upon graduation, in 1980, Hunter headed for New York City, where—in a fateful coincidence reminiscent of the angelic interventions inSaving Grace—she met playwright Beth Henley in a stalled elevator. Hunter went on to perform in several of Henley’s Southern Gothic plays, debuting on Broadway inCrimes of the Heart. The karma continued when writer-director brothers Joel and Ethan Coen approached her to star in their first film, Blood Simple; she had another commitment but suggested they talk instead to Frances McDormand, her roommate at the time. McDormand got the role (and ended up marrying Joel), and the Coens handed Hunter her big movie break in their second film, 1987’s Raising Arizona. That raucous baby-napping comedy gave Hunter’s quirky humor maximum exposure, and suddenly she was on Hollywood’s map.
That same year, Hunter was cast at the last minute to replace a pregnant Debra Winger in Broadcast News. The role, written for Winger by James L. Brooks, was that of a news producer whose romantic dilemma—being pursued by both a pretty-boy talking head (William Hurt) and a talented but nerdy reporter (Albert Brooks)—mirrored the network’s competing goals of style and substance.
One week into rehearsals, Hunter remembers, “I broke down—wept!—right as the rehearsal was coming to an end. I made something up, like, ‘I have something in my eye.’ No one believed it. I was crying because I was so afraid. I was devastated after I rehearsed with Bill and realized that I was going to have to play somebody who was smarter than him, who found him on some levels repellent.” Hurt’s character may have been a lightweight, but the brainy actor certainly wasn’t—and it was up to Hunter to make her character’s disdain for him believable. “I was so afraid of not being able to do that,” she says. “It seemed impossible.”
Albert Brooks could feel how much Hunter had riding on Broadcast News. “The way it went down—that it was last-minute, it was such a big part, and Jim Brooks had won all kinds of awards for Terms of Endearment—everything was, ‘Oh my god, this is the female part of the year,’ ” he says. “Intensity was at a peak every moment with Holly.”
