Finding a voice: Through narration, Linda Hunt remakes a career

By Jim Merritt
Newsday
Staff Writer

April 20, 1998

LINDA HUNT IS PERPLEXED. How is it possible, she wonders, to live life to the fullest under the shadow of a death sentence? It's not an academic question for the Academy Award-winning actress, whose latest film project is Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer's End, a documentary about an author and gay activist who, although dying of AIDS, still manages to celebrate life.

Hunt, whose distinctive voice seems to be everywhere lately, provided the narration for the film, which won last year's Sundance Film Festival audience award in the documentary competition. It screens on Long Island tomorrow and Wednesday at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington. She was also a friend and admirer of Monette, a reader of his books and a contemporary. Both were born in 1945, grew up in New England -- Hunt in Westport, Conn., and Monette in Lawrence, Mass. - and sought success in Hollywood.

Hunt found it at age 37, when she won the 1983 Oscar for best supporting actress playing Billy Kwan, a Chinese-Australian dwarf who ushers Mel Gibson through The Year of Living Dangerously. For Monette, success took a bit longer. He had knocked about Hollywood writing novelizations of popular films such as Predator and Scarface and achieved middling success as a novelist before finally discovering his unique voice -- and finding national acclaim - writing first-person dispatches from the front lines of the AIDS epidemic.

By the time they met at a Los Angeles tea party in 1993, Hunt and Monette were mutual admirers. "I envy writers," she says. "I would love to be a writer, and Paul was one of the first writers I've known." She had already read all of Monette's nonfiction works, including Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, a groundbreaking first-person account of his experiences as caregiver for a terminally ill life partner, Roger Horwitz. By then, Monette had also become a star, winning the National Book Award for nonfiction -- over such contenders as David McCullough's biography of Harry Truman and Garry Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg -- for his autobiography, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story.

Reading the books and getting to know their author were important to Hunt at a time of personal challenges. "I hadn't really had a job in two years, and I was extremely worried about money," she recalls. "When I met Paul my mother was dying and subsequently died; there were other very close people in my life who were also dying at the same time -- no one was dying of AIDS, they were dying of old age and they were dying of cancer -- and I was becoming 50 at the same time that Paul was becoming 50, and so his relationship to death was extremely powerful for me. I didn't know how to handle any of it."

Apparently, Monette did. He was "fierce," Hunt recalls. "Talking to him was talking more directly to somebody, and somebody talking more directly out of himself, than I'd ever experienced before, and that meant a great deal to me. It's how I wish I could be without having to be dying of AIDS or cancer ... He'd been blessed with this great clarity about himself, and I remember being so moved by that."

She attended Monette's last birthday party, at which the author cheerfully received "a Barbie doll to add to his collection, and an amazing wardrobe." After his death at age 49, in February, 1995, she read from the author's essays at a memorial service in Los Angeles. Writer-director Monte Bramer and producer Lesli Klainberg had already toiled three years turning Monette's life into cinema verite. They had given Monette a videocamera to record personal moments, capturing a "wonderful vignette of two guys in love," Hunt says.

Hunt's association with the project helped the filmmakers scrape together a $140,000 budget, including a donation from the actress. To complete the film -- it was Bramer's narration that was actually heard in the rough cut shown in Park City -- Hunt recorded the voiceover. "She added a strength and a sensitivity that the subject matter really needed," says Klainberg.

Hunt takes pride in such voiceover work, which she calls becoming "the voice of the film." While making The Year of Living Dangerously, she recalls, "only in the editing of the film Kwan became the narrator. It was a kind of afterthought on [director] Peter Weir's part. It was never written that way, or shot that way." She has since become the cultured voice of FedEx commercials and nature documentaries, as well as playing Judge Zoe Hiller on ABC's The Practice.

Although Hunt doesn't appear in The Brink of Summer's End, she considers it one of the important films of her career, on a par with impersonating Alice B. Toklas in the cult item, Waiting for the Moon. The Monette film -- she has seen it six times -- keeps driving her back to that nagging question. "In the film last night, I was so aware of how Paul doesn't speak about death really. He doesn't. He speaks about life. And in the books, the same is true." she says. "I was trying to figure this out, how long Paul had actually been a man of sorrow and acquainted with death, as they sing in `The Messiah.' Paul lived with death intimately for probably a dozen years."

Although Hunt is doing very well, thank you, she says she still grapples with the idea of her own mortality. "I'm still learning ... how you live with it, how you don't stop living because of the fact of it, but how you really live with it." Meanwhile, with a thriving career and a longtime partner of her own, she admits: "I'm ready to be 52 now."

Copyright 1998 Newsday

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