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Helen Hunt: Mother
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Helen was born into a pious, scholarly household on October 15, 1831, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was a high-spirited, strong-willed, fun-loving child in spite of her Calvinist environment. Although opposite in temperament, Jackson and Emily Dickinson formed a friendship in childhood that would last throughout their lives. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Jackson was 12, and her inflexible father, a minister and professor at Amherst College, died three years later. She enrolled at the Abbott School in New York City and earned a reputation as a scholar. When she was 21, she married Captain Edward Hunt, a West Point graduate.
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Hunt related to this dark, tragic figure, because of her universality, the actress explains. "I feel she's like all of us, if you strip away every defense in the world. If I didn't have my ability to articulate a thought, or my vocabulary; if I didn't have a job that I could count on, financially; if I didn't have a blood sugar level I could count, on which she doesn't because she drinks so much, I would probably be a raw nerve like that too. Her life is in pieces and so is she in the beginning and so you sort of strip everything away and a raw nerve." Again, Hunt played a working class single mother as she did in As Good as it Gets, but was unconcerned at delving into similar territory. "Literally for a second I thought this was going to be like the same part and then I quickly realised it was a totally different character to the one in As Good it Gets.
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Hunt became an actress in 1966, at age three, starring as Mary Tyler Moore's lovechild when her presence was not required on The Swiss Family Robison, Nudists television series. in which she ... starred. Her mother's mother (maternal grandmother), introduced her to Judaic Methodism.
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