Martita Hunt

Martita Edith Hunt was a British theatre and film actress born on 30 January 1899 in Salto, Uruguay, to English parents Alfred and Marta Hunt. At the age of ten she relocated with her family to the United Kingdom, where she attended Queenwood Ladies' College in Eastbourne before training as an actress. She died on 13 June 1969 at her home in Hampstead, London, of bronchial asthma, aged 70, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 19 June; her ashes rest in the Ivor Novello Rose Bed. She never married, and her estate was valued at £5,390.

Hunt launched her acting career in repertory theatre in Liverpool before establishing herself in London, where her first appearance came in the Stage Society's production of Ernst Toller's The Machine Wreckers at the Kingsway Theatre in May 1923. Through the remainder of the 1920s she worked across West End venues and club theatres, taking on roles that included the Principessa della Cercola in W. Somerset Maugham's Our Betters at the Globe in 1924, Mrs. Linde in Ibsen's A Doll's House at the Playhouse in 1925, and parts in a 1926 Chekhov season at the Barnes Theatre under Theodore Komisarjevsky, where she played Charlotta Ivanovna in The Cherry Orchard and Olga in Three Sisters.

In September 1929 Hunt joined the Old Vic company under Harcourt Williams, spending eight months there in an extensive range of classical roles. Alongside non-Shakespearean parts — Béline in Molière's The Imaginary Invalid, Queen Elizabeth in Shaw's The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and Lavinia in Shaw's Androcles and the Lion — she took on a succession of major Shakespearean characters: the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Portia in both The Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar, the Queen in Richard II, Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Rosalind in As You Like It, Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, and Gertrude in Hamlet. The latter three productions featured John Gielgud. Donald Roy, writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, noted that Hunt's Gertrude was considered by some critics the finest they had seen, citing her arresting appearance and dominant stage presence as making her most effective in strong, tragic characters.

Returning to the West End through the 1930s and 1940s, Hunt accumulated a wide range of credits. These included Edith Gunter in Dodie Smith's Autumn Crocus at the Lyric in 1931, the Countess of Rousillon in All's Well That Ends Well at the Arts in 1932, Lady Strawholme in Ivor Novello's Fresh Fields at the Criterion in 1933, Liz Frobisher in John Van Druten's The Distaff Side at the Apollo in 1933, Barbara Dawe in Clemence Dane's Moonlight Is Silver at the Queen's in 1934, Theodora in Elmer Rice's Not for Children at the Fortune in 1935, Masha in Chekhov's The Seagull at the New Theatre in 1936, Emilia in the 1938 Old Vic production of Othello, the Mother in an English-language version of García Lorca's Bodas de sangre at the Savoy in 1939, Léonie in Jean Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles at the Gate in 1940, Mrs. Cheveley in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband at the Westminster in 1943, and Cornelia in John Webster's The White Devil at the Duchess in 1947.

Alongside her stage work, Hunt appeared in a number of British films during the late 1930s and 1940s, including Good Morning, Boys (1937), Trouble Brewing (1939), The Man in Grey (1943), and The Wicked Lady (1945). Her most celebrated screen performance came in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946), in which she played Miss Havisham — a role she had previously performed in a 1939 stage adaptation by Alec Guinness that served as a direct inspiration for Lean's film. Writing in 1999, critic Roger Ebert described her as dominating the film's early scenes, playing Miss Havisham as a beak-nosed, shabby figure bedecked in crumbling lace and linen.

Hunt made her Broadway debut between 1948 and 1950, appearing in the English-speaking premiere of Jean Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot as Countess Aurelia. The role earned her the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Dramatic Role in 1949. She subsequently appeared in the production's 1952 tour, though to comparatively less impact. Her later stage work included The Sleeping Prince at the Phoenix Theatre in 1953 and, in her final stage role, Angélique Boniface in Hotel Paradiso — an adaptation from Feydeau featuring Alec Guinness — at the Winter Garden Theatre in May 1956.

Hunt's film career continued through the 1950s and 1960s with appearances in Anna Karenina (1948), The Fan (1949), Anastasia (1956), Three Men in a Boat (1956), The Admirable Crichton (1957), The Brides of Dracula (1960), The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), Becket (1964), The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), and Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965). On television she appeared as Lady Bastable in several adaptations of Saki stories in 1962. Materials from her career, spanning approximately the 1910s to the 1960s, are held in eleven folders by the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre and Performance Department under reference number THM/132/3.