The 1990s saw Helen Hunt appearing everywhere. The world was enamored of her since she starred in the enduring sitcom Mad About You. But after the show was canceled in 1999, the actress has become less and less visible. How come? What Helen Hunt has been doing while stepping away from the spotlight is detailed here.
Breakups occur frequently, both in Hollywood and outside of it, but Helen Hunt shocked many in 2017 by breaking up with her producer boyfriend of 16 years, Matthew Carnahan.
Since 2001, the two had been together, and in 2004, they gave birth to a daughter, Makena Lei Gordon Carnahan. And yet, despite the fact that “Helen and Matthew always appeared to be tremendously in love,” according to In Touch Weekly, they couldn’t make it last. The tabloid’s source claimed that “the breakup was really messy.”
The two had carried out this activity repeatedly in the past, according to the same source. “Over the years, Matthew relocated a number of times. He would always be ejected by Helen, who would then always take him back “they sent word. However, it appears that they are now truly divorced and that not even their shared love for their kid could keep them together.
Helen Hunt gave birth daughter Makena on May 13, 2004, just a few months before turning 41. This was a clear compelling cause for Helen Hunt to take a break from the Hollywood grind. After a life without children, it makes total sense that Hunt would want to spend more time at home raising her baby.
Makena is no longer a young child, thus Hunt may start to appear more frequently in the world of celebrities once more. But then again, maybe not. Makena, who is still Hunt’s only child, will undoubtedly require a lot of love and support as her family disintegrates. Until Makena is an adult, it’s probable that Hunt may continue to avoid the spotlight in favor of parenting. Time will only tell.
Since her peak as Mad, Helen Hunt has continued to produce films. Except for a few instances, you might not have known about them.
At the height of her fame, Hunt appeared in movies like 1997’s As Good As It Gets, which earned over $315 million worldwide thanks to a winning combination of Hunt’s magnetism and Jack Nicholson’s deft crack-avoiding. She starred in Twister, a disaster epic that brought in about $500 million, the year prior. She starred in the 2000 films What Women Want and Cast Away, which earned $375 million and $430 million, respectively, just after Mad About You came to an end.
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Dr. T and the Women, Bobby, and The Sessions, however, followed, and none of them managed to win over audiences. Every Day, which debuted in three theaters, never went past four, earned a pitiful $46,029 over ten weeks, and crawled away with a whimper, had to be her career low. Furthermore, the fact that it marked Hunt’s return to the big screen after a three-year absence makes Every Day’s failure all the more regrettable.
Then She Found Me, a movie adaptation of the Elinor Lipman book, marked Helen Hunt’s debut as a director and star. Hunt looked especially suited for this type of dramedy given the success of As Good As It Gets, which helped establish the genre.
The Los Angeles Times’s Carina Chocano singled out Hunt’s portrayal, saying it “a touch too whiny, a little too angry to be really sympathetic,” which is regrettably why Then She Found Me failed to wow critics. Ouch.
Both of Hunt’s performances came under fire from Christy DeSmith of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who claimed that Hunt’s direction was “heavy-handed” and that the movie’s “endeavor at realism is not very creative.” DeSmith added insult to injury by criticizing both Hunt’s acting and her portrayal of a “devoted party-pooper” that the audience can hardly stomach as Hunt’s “schtick.” Ouch twice.
Helen Hunt was forced out of “semi-retirement” in 2006 to play a small part in Emilio Estevez’s film Bobby, which was about the day Robert F. Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel. According to Hunt, who emphasized the significance of the movie for her, “My daughter will hear what [Kennedy] said in a way that might be feelable to her in a way, because she will have—if she watches the movie—will have watched this group of people make their way toward that fateful moment, so by the time Bobby Kennedy’s speech plays, you know, her heart will be open and she will really hear what he said.”
The Boston Globe’s Ty Burr, however, described Bobby as “a cry of social pain that shoots itself in the foot on a scene-by-scene basis” and compared it to “a highway pileup.” Hopefully Hunt’s daughter experienced the desired effect. Cole Smithey, a critic, was even less understanding, saying “This film has nothing to do with Bobby Kennedy and everything to do with Estevez’s inflated ego. It is shameful.”
Although none of those remarks are specifically directed towards Hunt, we assume that Bobby wasn’t the glorious Hollywood comeback she may have envisioned.
The loss of a family member is one of the hardest things for anyone to deal with, and sadly, Helen Hunt has experienced this.
Gordon Hunt, Helen’s father, and a renowned animator and live-action television director, died on December 17, 2016, at the age of 87. Prior to his passing, he reportedly suffered Parkinson’s disease, according to the Hollywood Reporter. As was to be expected, Mad About You was a significant part of his filmography; he directed 31 of the 164 episodes of the show. One of the episodes had Hunt’s character giving birth, which had to have been a particularly memorable experience for them both even though the birth was fictitious.
If you questioned 100 individuals who knew him, 100 of them would say he was the kindest man they knew, as Helen stated in remembrance of her father. She honored him even before his passing; she named her 2014 surfing movie Ride after him. He was an active and enthusiastic bodysurfer from the 1930s until a few years before his passing.
Hollywood performers are now in a difficult situation. They are denied opportunities in an industry that is fixated on youth and its appeal when they are no longer youthful and attractive. They may therefore get minor cosmetic surgery to remove the wrinkles, creases, and bags that develop on their faces as they become older in order to keep getting the major roles to which they are accustomed and deserve. Sometimes, those operations fall short, and instead of making the well-known star look “like themselves,” they appear to look different or even unrecognizable, which means they struggle to land gigs since they’ve lost their most valuable selling point—their faces.
Such a thing might have happened to Helen Hunt. With careful picture research, the analysts at Glamour Path hypothesized that Hunt had cosmetic surgery because her face and neck clearly look different. Despite Hunt’s denials, viewers of her miniseries World on Fire believed she had undergone plastic surgery and found her new appearance to be a distraction from the show.
