Death: Kim Hunter
Occupation: Actress
Date of Birth: Nov. 12, 1922
Date of Death: Sept. 11, 2002
Cause of Death: apparent heart attack, according to her daughter, Kathryn Emmett.
Place of Death: Her Greenwich Village apt.
Movies: "A Streetcar Named Desire," ``Deadline U.S.A.,'' as newspaper editor Humphrey Bogart's estranged wife; ``Anything Can Happen,'' as Russian immigrant Jose Ferrer's wife; ``Storm Center,'' a minor film starring Bette Davis; also ``The Young Stranger,'' ``Bermuda Affair,'' ``Money, Women and Guns,'' ``Lilith'', ``Planet of the Apes,'' ``Beneath the Planet of the Apes'', ``Escape from the Planet of the Apes''
Notes: Kim Hunter won a supporting Oscar in 1951 as the long-suffering Stella in ``A Streetcar Named Desire. '' Also appearing in that movie were Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, Karl Malden as Mitch, and Vivien Leigh as the tragic Blanche DuBois. In casting for the picture, director Elia Kazan said ``The minute I saw her I was attracted to her, which is the best possible reaction when casting young women.'' Leigh, Malden and Hunter won Academy Awards; despite his unforgettable performance, Brando did not. Humphrey Bogart was awarded a long overdue Oscar for ``The African Queen.''
Hunter was blacklisted during the communist scare of the 1950s. Hunter, a liberal Democrat, was listed as a communist sympathizer by Red Channels, a red-hunting pamphlet.
In the three Planet of the Apes movies, Hunter was Dr. Zira, a chimpanzee psychiatrist. The series was about astronauts who discover a future world ruled by apes, with humans as slaves. It took hours to put the makeup on Hunter. She told a reporter in 1988: ``It was pretty claustrophobic and painful to a certain extent. The only thing of me that came through was my eyeballs.''
Her mother had been a concert pianist. Her name at birth was Janet Cole. She recalled later that she was a lonely child who ``picked friends out of books and played `let's pretend' games, acting out their characters before a mirror.''
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