Holly Hunter

Holly Hunter is an American actress born on March 20, 1958, in Conyers, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. The youngest of six children, she is the daughter of Marguerite "Dee Dee" Hunter, a homemaker, and Charles Edwin Hunter, a part-time sporting goods company representative who also farmed a 250-acre property. Her first acting experience came in a fifth-grade production in which she played Helen Keller. She later performed in local stagings of Oklahoma!, Man of La Mancha, and Fiddler on the Roof while attending Rockdale County High School in the early 1970s. Hunter earned a degree in drama from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she subsequently performed ingenue roles at City Theater, then known as the City Players. She is unable to hear with her left ear as a result of a childhood case of the mumps, a condition that has occasionally required adjustments to film scripts so she can use her right ear on set.

After relocating to New York City, Hunter roomed with actress Frances McDormand in the Bronx, at the end of the D train line on Bainbridge Avenue and Hull Avenue near 205th Street. A chance encounter with playwright Beth Henley — the two were briefly trapped together in an elevator on 49th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue around the beginning of 1982 — led directly to Hunter's casting in Henley's work. She succeeded Mary Beth Hurt in the Broadway production of Crimes of the Heart and also appeared in Henley's Off-Broadway play The Miss Firecracker Contest. Her Broadway career, which spanned 1981 to 2003, additionally included The Wake of Jamey Foster and The Play What I Wrote.

Hunter made her film debut in the 1981 slasher film The Burning. After moving to Los Angeles in 1982, she appeared in television movies before landing a supporting role in the 1984 film Swing Shift. That same year she made an uncredited appearance as a voice on an answering-machine recording in the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple. Her profile rose considerably in 1987, when she starred in the Coens' Raising Arizona and received her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her performance in Broadcast News.

Hunter's work in the early 1990s brought her sustained critical recognition. She starred in Steven Spielberg's romantic drama Always alongside Richard Dreyfuss, with whom she later reteamed in Once Around. Her 1989 television film Roe vs. Wade, a docudrama about the Supreme Court case, earned her a Primetime Emmy Award. A second Emmy followed for The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom in 1993. That same year, Hunter received two simultaneous Academy Award nominations: a Best Supporting Actress nomination for The Firm and the Best Actress award for her portrayal of a mute Scottish woman in Jane Campion's The Piano, a role that also brought her a BAFTA Award, a Silver Bear, a Cannes Film Festival Award, a Golden Globe, and an AACTA Award.

Hunter continued working steadily through the mid-to-late 1990s, appearing in the comedy-drama Home for the Holidays and the thriller Copycat, both in 1995. She appeared in David Cronenberg's Crash in 1996 and starred alongside Danny DeVito, Queen Latifah, and Martin Donovan in Living Out Loud. She closed out the decade with a supporting role in the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? in 2000. Her television work during this period included the title role of tennis professional Billie Jean King in When Billie Beat Bobby and the lead in Harlan County War, a television film about labor struggles among Kentucky coal miners.

In 2003, Hunter earned Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as a mother named Melanie Freeland in the critically acclaimed film Thirteen. The following year she provided the voice of Helen Parr, also known as Elastigirl, in Pixar's animated superhero film The Incredibles, a role she reprised in the Disney Infinity video game series and in the 2018 sequel Incredibles 2. Hunter also helped develop and executive produce the TNT drama series Saving Grace, in which she starred from 2007 to 2010, receiving a Golden Globe nomination, two Screen Actors Guild Award nominations, and an Emmy Award nomination for her performance. On May 30, 2008, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2009 she was awarded the Women in Film Lucy Award.

Hunter played Senator Finch in the 2016 film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, with her likeness also used in a tie-in prequel comic released by Dr. Pepper on February 3, 2016. She appeared in The Big Sick in 2017 and took on a recurring role as CEO Rhea Jarrell in the HBO series Succession in 2019. She subsequently starred opposite Ted Danson in the 2021 NBC comedy Mr. Mayor. In 2025, she appeared as Madeline Vance in the science fiction film The Electric State, and she joined the cast of the Paramount+ series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which began in 2026.

In her personal life, Hunter was married to cinematographer Janusz Kamiński from 1995 until 2001. She has been in a relationship with British actor Gordon MacDonald since 2001, having met him during a production of Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats at San Jose Repertory Theatre, in which she played a woman abandoned by her lover of fourteen years and MacDonald played that lover. The couple's twin sons were born in January 2006.