Holly Hunter Takes Hollywood

By RICHARD CORLISS

It's dawn in the Midwest, and Jane Craig, network-news producer on location, is already hard at work. She jogs outside her motel past a phalanx of newspaper machines and buys a copy of every available paper. She phones her colleagues awake in other motel rooms -- thank heaven, two of them are married, saves a call. She indulges a pal's dead-on impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then she unplugs the phone, sits on her bed and has a good cry: heaving shoulders, racking sobs, a face contorted into a bruised fist, a doll in tears because no one will buy her. Is this person in control? Perfectly. There is no wasted motion or emotion in this petite dynamo. Jane has simply, in the words of the actress who portrays her, "penciled in times to cry."

Holly Hunter touches all of Jane's moods -- funny, flinty, vulnerable, bizarrely controlled -- before the opening credits of Writer-Director James L. Brooks' Broadcast News are concluded. At first, this protean display seems the equivalent of a Save the Children billboard on Sunset Strip: "Won't someone please nominate this girl for an Oscar?" But Hunter, 29 and 5 ft. 2 in., is no late entry in the prima donna sweepstakes. She is a hardscrabble sprite from Conyers, Ga., a dues payer from off-Broadway (Beth Henley's The Miss Firecracker Contest) and off-Hollywood (Joel and Ethan Coen's Raising Arizona) whose only eccentricity, says Joel Coen, "is how easy she is to work with." She has built a boutique gallery of daft characters: nymphets and star children who swagger like cowgirls. And now she stars in the most coveted role in the year's smartest entertainment. When Broadcast News opens this week, Hollywood will stop asking (as Brooks did two days before he hired her) "Who is Holly Hunter?" and start demanding "Get me Holly Hunter!"

In Brooks' beguilingly skeptical romance, Jane is the Lois Lane of the '80s, a newswoman whose affections are torn between a Clark Kent reporter (Albert Brooks) and a flawed Superman-anchorman (William Hurt). The male leads had long been cast, but until just before rehearsals, Jim Brooks was still looking for his "little steamroller." Debra Winger, who had shone in his Terms of Endearment, was pregnant and unavailable. Sigourney Weaver, Mary Beth Hurt, Christine Lahti, Judy Davis -- all were fine, but nobody was right.

Then Hunter stepped into the glass slipper. "Why should I be nervous?" she recalls thinking as she walked into a Manhattan hotel suite to meet Jim Brooks and Bill Hurt. "There was no way in hell I was going to get this role." Within moments, Brooks thought otherwise. "She read her part like a dream," he says. "No, wait, I'm building legends here. She read better than a dream. She read like a gifted actress." And once this non-star got the part, she assumed a control and drive worthy of Jane. "The best thing in her is that Holly never questioned that this was exactly where she should be," Brooks observes. "She gives it everything all the time. She floors it and goes till she drops."

She has been going since she started, the youngest of seven children on a beef and hay farm in the Atlanta suburbs. "The house is real sequestered away from people," says Hunter in a lilting twang punctuated by the occasional dadgummit. "The farm isn't groomed -- there's a kind of wildness to the place. It's beautiful, a little Nirvana down there." Holly was the willful tomboy. "My father did not approve of my learning to drive a tractor," she says, "which is probably why I'm so stubborn. He made the rules, and I broke them. But, like everyone who grows up on a farm, I got a working knowledge of life and death and what goes on in between. Cats get bitten by snakes, dogs get run over -- and then a calf is born. It's healthy to see the life cycle going on around you."

Holly began acting in the ninth grade because "the people who were involved in this drama stuff seemed like a pretty happening group. The teacher seemed real fun. So I signed up." After four years in the theater program at Carnegie-Mellon University, Hunter hit New York City. One day, hurrying to audition for a Beth Henley play, she met the author in a stalled elevator, and a few weeks later Henley signed Hunter to replace Mary Beth Hurt in Crimes of the Heart on Broadway. "She picks up a script of mine, and it becomes alive," says Henley. "Holly and I share a Southern sensibility: that joyous- despairing view of life."

These days, Hunter has little reason to despair, and no time for a penciled- in cry. In Raising Arizona she earned the usual critical raves as canny, resilient Ed McDonnough, lullabying her purloined baby to sleep with a grotesquely poignant backwoods ballad. (Holly chose the Charlie Monroe song herself.) She is happy to keep her private life -- which she shares with Photographer John Raffo -- private. And Hunter, whose goal was always "to be one of the really respected stage actresses," doesn't mind juggling her newfound fame with rehearsals for a Los Angeles production of Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind. She still loves the stage: "It's so enticing and dangerous. It's human. It might be a bad night, or it might be magic, electrifying, unforgettable." The lure of movie stardom goes both ways too. When Holly Hunter's around, you can bet on magic.

With reporting by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles