TORONTO — Marsha Hunt, one of the last surviving actors from Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s who worked with performers ranging from Laurence Olivier to Andy Griffith in a career disrupted for a time by the McCarthy-era blacklist, has died. She was 104.
The reason, she learned from her agent, was that the communist-hunting Red Channels publication had revealed that she attended a peace conference in Stockholm and other supposedly suspicious gatherings. Alongside Hollywood stars Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart and Danny Kaye, Hunt also went to Washington in 1947 to protest the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was conducting a witch hunt for communists in the film industry.
An early marriage to director Jerry Hopper ended in divorce. In 1948 she married film writer Robert Presnell Jr., and they had one daughter, who died soon after her premature birth. Her husband died in 1986. She left Paramount for MGM around the time of “Gone with the Wind” and had lead or supporting roles in “These Glamour Girls,” “Flight Command” and “The Human Comedy” among other movies.
“I was never a communist or even interested in the communist cause,” she declared in 1996. “I was a political innocent defending my industry.”
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