Biography

Linda Hunt

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Linda Hunt is a veteran character actress who had only just begun acting in motion pictures when director Peter Weir required her peculiarities to animate one of cinema's most esoteric characters, Billy Kwan, the intellectual and virtuous Chinese-Australian dwarf and photographer, in the Australian romantic drama, The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). Hunt's work in the film earned an Oscar, among many critic awards, all for Best Supporting Actress.
- IMDb mini biography by: arv.0705@gmail.com

The first actor to have won an Academy Award portraying a member of the opposite sex, she won the Best Actress in a Supporting Role Oscar for her role as Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). Note this was not Linda Hunt playing a woman pretending to be a man, like Barbra Streisand did in Yentl (1983) or, in reverse, as Dustin Hoffman did in Tootsie (1982), but Hunt playing a man in a serious drama.
Her voice work includes narration for the History Channel, as well as National Public Radio.
Attended the Interlochen Arts Academy. She was a charter student the first year of the Interlochen Arts Academy, which was established in 1962 as a complement to the Interlochen Arts Camp, which had been established in 1928.
Has twice played male roles that did not feature or reference her actual female status: Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) and The Management in Carnivàle (2003) (who, though mostly unseen, is often referred to by other characters as male).
Has lived with her romantic partner, psychotherapist Karen Klein, since 1987. Hunt's official biography on the CBS website for NCIS: Los Angeles (2009) refers to Klein as Hunt's spouse.

Everybody either wanted to take care of me or push me around, you know? I was teased a lot, sure I was, of course. Fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, everybody was taking their spurts except me. I was not growing up.
When I was 16, nobody else talked like me. Nobody else sounded like me.
What's it like being opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger? For me? Are you kidding? Maybe if I'm lucky, come up to his navel!
When I was growing up, particularly during puberty in my teen years, I was so miserable because I elicited so much teasing and meanness from my teenage cohorts.
I can't be a man. But I can embrace the head of a man, the intelligence of a man, the spirit of a man.

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