INTERVIEW: No plastic surgery, no entourage, no prima donna behaviour - and no conversation. As film stars go, Helen Hunt is remarkably ordinary, writes Donald Clarke
HELEN HUNT is not fabulous. She doesn't flounce into the room. No entourage carries her train. Contentedly wrinkly and sun-scorched at 45, she doesn't appear to have indulged in any silly plastic surgery and she seems to have stayed far away from Angelina Jolie's tattooist.
None of this will come as a surprise to her fans. A successful child actor in the 1970s, she went on to secure worldwide recognition as an ordinary Jane in the TV sitcom Mad About You. Then, in 1997, acting opposite the far-from-ordinary Jack Nicholson, she won an Oscar playing a hard-working mum in As Good as it Gets.
So, nothing in her public life implies she is anything other than a solid, sensible person. Still, I had expected somebody a bit more, well, lively.
Hunt is perfectly nice, but she is never going to win prizes as a conversationalist. What does she like to do with her spare time? "I don't know. Surf a little. Play with my daughter," she mutters. Does she enjoy living in LA? "I guess. Well, my parents are there. So it's home. It's not like I moved there to get into the movies." And so on. Hunt's apparent lack of enthusiasm is all the more surprising when you consider that she is in London to promote her first film as director.
Then She Found Me, adapted from a novel by Elinor Lipman, finds Hunt playing a harassed primary school teacher who, in middle age, encounters the woman who put her up for adoption decades earlier. When you hear that Bette Midler plays the protagonist's birth mother, you will understand why the revelation stirs up mixed emotions.
The production notes suggest Hunt had some trouble gathering finance for the picture. Surely she is now famous enough to stomp into the studio and demand a few million dollars? The comment is meant somewhat facetiously, but she doesn't laugh. "No. That's miles from the truth. I guess there are a few actors that can do that, but certainly not me."
It must have been tricky combining film direction with motherhood. In 2004, Hunt and her partner, the screenwriter Matthew Carnahan, brought the exotically named Makena Lei Gordon Carnahan, a daughter, into the world.
"It was crazy, I guess," she sighs. "My boyfriend was developing a series at the time, so I was doing the only job in show business harder than his. One of the upsides to a low-budget production was that we could afford to shoot only for six weeks. So I wasn't away from her for too long. Then, in post-production, I had loads of time. I was almost afraid to be given more money, because more time would get eaten up."
Having grown up within the entertainment industry, Hunt was already aware of the pressures that result from juggling family affairs with show business. Her father, Gordon Hunt, was a successful voice artist and television director. Her mother was a photographer. Brooding on that background, one imagines her being prodded on to the stage by hopeful stage parents. After all, before she reached her mid-teens, she had already played Murray Slaughter's daughter in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, one of America's greatest sitcoms, and secured a regular role in the TV version of The Swiss Family Robinson.
"No. My parents didn't have any kind of agenda there," she murmurs. "In fact, I always got the impression they tolerated rather than encouraged my wishes to go into the business. But, yeah, my dad directed plays, so I had been around the theatre and wanted to go into that business."
It was a long, slow slog to stardom for Hunt. Look hard and you will spot her in countless television episodes and films throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but it wasn't until 1992, when she was cast in Mad About You, that she gained a degree of professional security. In the past, she has suggested that maybe she didn't have the right look for a movie star. What did she mean by that? "I don't know. Did I say that?" Well, she did say that she wasn't very sexy or glamorous. "I don't quite recall saying that, but, yeah, if you grow up in the era of Michelle Pfeiffer then it is easy to think you're not sexy enough to be in the movies."
At any rate, Mad About You, with its tight scripts and snappy performances, proved to be a big success and helped propel her towards premier-league stardom.
Had Hunt found fame a decade earlier, it might have been more difficult to break into movies. Until the mid-1980s, when the likes of Bruce Willis and Michael J Fox began moving from television into films, a near-unbreakable glass partition divided the two media.
"I think that's right," she says. "Maybe it started to change when Robert Redford put Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People back in 1980. Then later, as you say, people like Michael J Fox and Bruce Willis made the jump. In the 1990s, people like George Clooney and I managed it. It really was ridiculous that people believed you could excel on one screen and not the other."
As Good as It Gets was, in fact, only her second major film role since achieving success with Mad About You (her first was Twister). Director James L Brooks, creator of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, managed to devise a role for Hunt that emphasised her white-bread ordinariness while allowing her to stretch out dramatically.
Though never exactly a staple of the scandal sheets, Hunt has spent time with a small huddle of famous boyfriends. In the early 1990s, she dated Matthew Broderick, her co-star in Then She Found Me, and enjoyed spending time with him in Donegal. "We had such a lovely time there," she recalls. "And my boyfriend, who's a Carnahan - and Irish - would like to go, too. We have this daughter with bright red hair that people always comment on. Maybe, if we go to Ireland, she will just seem normal."
She was briefly married to Hank Azaria, the actor who voices many of the characters in The Simpsons, but, since their break-up in 2000, has remained silent about the ups and downs of that relationship. "We meet from time to time. We have a lot of mutual friends," she says succinctly when his name comes up.
Anyway, life does appear to have worked out quite nicely for her. Over the past five years, she has taken relatively few film roles - a smallish part in Emilio Estevez's Bobby, a turn in Mike Barker's A Good Woman - but she seems to have established a happy home in LA with Carnahan. She is currently settling down to write another film and spends the rest of her days polishing her surfboard, minding her child and fuming about George W Bush.
Does she have any particular ambitions left to fulfil? "I don't know. I'd like to write some more. That sort of thing," she says, before her sentence peters off into weary silence.
Oh, I do wish she'd liven up a bit.
Then She Found Me is on limited release.