Looking back on an accomplished life, Marsha Hunt’s most prized title was being named “Hollywood’s youngest character actress,” as she joyfully conveyed in the documentary MARSHA HUNT’S SWEET ADVERSITY (2015). Unlike most actors, Hunt actually started her career in lead roles at Paramount in 1935, but she really shined in the wide variety of character parts MGM offered her when she signed with the studio in 1939.

“Whenever there was something hard to cast, they’d say, ‘Give it to Marsha and see what she will do with it,’ which was such a compliment. Stardom was not the idea for me, nor was it my goal,” Hunt told me in 2014.

As MARSHA HUNT’S SWEET ADVERSITY illustrates, the word “character” isn’t only reserved for the 103-year-old actress’s movie roles. Hunt’s personal integrity was central to her life onscreen and off, as she fought back as a victim of the Hollywood Blacklist and later fueled her passion and energy into activism.

As a liberal-minded American, Hunt found her upstanding character attacked in the late 1940s. Horrified that 19 of her Hollywood colleagues were denied their constitutional rights in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), she traveled to Washington in 1947 with the Committee for the First Amendment to “defend as best we could the rights and freedoms” of her blacklisted associates. The events in Washington disturbed Hunt and her husband, Robert Presnell Jr. so much that they subsequently lent their talents to the radio program “Hollywood Fights Back,” co-written by Presnell, to denounce the hearings and show their support of free speech in Hollywood.

Hunt’s actions proved controversial at the height of the Red Scare. Upon returning home from a European vacation in the early 1950s, she found that work offers, including several for her own TV show, had disappeared as a result of her name landing in Red Channels, a 1950 pamphlet cataloging alleged Communists and sympathizers in the industry. Ever the fighter, Hunt pushed back against the mistreatment and intimidation; she even wrote to those television networks to salvage the offers, detailing her vast patriotic enterprises and her wartime volunteer service, to no avail.

“Apparently, I could resume working if I apologized, and there was nothing to apologize for,” Hunt said in 2015. “I had done what I felt was needed and was not in the least ashamed of it.”

While Hunt continued to appear sporadically on film, TV and the stage throughout the 1950s and beyond, she turned the harshly imposed career hiatus into an opportunity to focus on other activities. The strong character Hunt demonstrated through her blacklisted period also manifested in another way: activism. After performing in a play in Australia in the mid-1950s, Hunt and her husband hopped around the globe. The journey opened her eyes to the beauty and hardships around the world, leaving Hunt a self-proclaimed “planet patriot” and setting her off on a humanitarian path to help global citizens over the ensuing seven decades.

Hunt’s first stop: the United Nations. Though many stars used their celebrity to promote the war effort, few did so for philanthropic causes in times of peace – but Hunt was one of them. From 1956 to 1983, she remained active in the United Nations Association, utilizing her fame to educate the public about the UN’s global work and serving as president of the San Fernando Valley Chapter. The actress even produced a short documentary to raise awareness and funds for the UN’s World Refugee Year, A CALL FROM THE STARS (’60), featuring friends like Harry Belafonte, Paul Newman and Jean Simmons. She also wrote the song “We’re All One,” which UNICEF translated and distributed to member nations around the world.

For the past several decades, Hunt has focused her attention on hunger and poverty. In addition to bringing innovative fundraising approaches to her work with the American Freedom from Hunger organization, she crafted the concept for “Thankful Giving” in the early 1970s, a Thanksgiving program designed to create awareness and amass funds for world hunger. After seven years of lobbying, the House and Senate officially backed the congressional resolution Hunt wrote, and President Jimmy Carter made “Thankful Giving” the centerpiece of his 1978 Thanksgiving Proclamation. (Sadly, it didn’t catch on.)

Hunt even put her title of honorary Mayor of Sherman Oaks, California, her home since the 1940s, to use from 1983 to 2001, making a difference in her community by forming the Valley Mayor’s Fund for the Homeless, among many other initiatives. Hunt’s extraordinarily inspiring efforts inside and outside Hollywood showcase the actress’s benevolence, perseverance and integrity in the face of adversity.

“I may have disappeared from the limelight in the 1950s, but I didn’t disappear from life,” she told the Los Angeles Daily News in November 2020. “I think I made a difference.” Lucky for us, both her screen performances and altruistic efforts endure.