It just got better

A DECADE ago, Helen Hunt won a Best Actress Oscar for playing Jack Nicholson's harassed waitress in As Good As It Gets.

Conventional wisdom would assume she would have parlayed that into more and bigger movie roles. But Hunt has been largely absent from films since then. Ask her what happened and she will explain simply: "I got a life."

"I fell in love, I had a daughter, so it was hard to find a part that was as interesting as watching her grow up. Why go off and pretend to be someone's mother, or pretend to be someone's wife, when I finally had the chance to have that experience in my real life?"

Actresses often talk about the rewards of motherhood over career, but they don't always follow this through. Hunt, on the other hand, not only retreated from acting, she also maintains a deliberate distance between Makena'lei, her four-year-old daughter with producer Matthew Carnahan, and her career. Since her daughter was born, she has appeared in only one movie, Emilio Estevez's superstar-studded Bobby. Not that Makena'lei would know this – she isn't allowed to watch TV.

Yet 44-year-old Hunt grew up surrounded by showbusiness. Her father was a theatre director, her mother a photographer, and she began acting professionally at the age of nine. Her early TV appearances included Swiss Family Robinson and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and adult roles include films such as What Women Want, Twister, and Pay It Forward. But it's a pretty safe bet that audiences best remember her Oscar-winning performance in As Good As It Gets, playing the only waitress who can put up with the obsessive compulsions of regular customer Melvin Udall (Nicholson).

In fact, Hunt almost got passed over for As Good As It Gets because writer/director James L Brooks wanted an older actress in order to finesse the already difficult romantic connection with Nicholson's 60-something curmudgeon. However, five minutes after Hunt's audition began, the notoriously finicky Simpsons director called for a video camera, not wanting to miss a moment of her performance. Hunt admits she was a little intimidated by Nicholson at first. "I was expecting a movie star and an actor's actor showed up," she explains. "I quickly figured out that Jack was going to be my biggest ally on this movie. He thinks about acting the same way I do. I was much more at ease when he was on the set than when he wasn't."

But by 2001, she says the post-statuette gold rush was over. "I just didn't see that many parts that I was aching to play," she says. "And the few that I did, I wasn't offered." But around the time of As Good As She Gets, she found the one project that proved unshakeable; a small human comedy called Then She Found Me.

"When I first read it, I thought there was something new in it," says Hunt. "Every movie is a reincarnation of every other movie after a while, with rare exceptions, and I thought I hadn't actually seen birth-mother-finds-grown-daughter before."

Hunt co-wrote, directed, produced, and stars in the film as April, a schoolteacher adopted at birth who is desperate for a child of her own. But she faces up to this just as her boneless husband (Matthew Broderick) has an epiphany that their short-lived marriage is a mistake and walks out the door. Incoming however is her long-absent, now-solicitous birth mother (Bette Midler) and a short-tempered single father with two young kids (Colin Firth).

The pregnancy plotline isn't in Elinor Lipman's novel, but Hunt felt the story needed baby weight: "I thought, April has to want something really badly. It has to be something we can watch her go after. And I always wanted a baby very badly, so it just seemed right that she should want a baby."

"People have asked if it's my story, and on the surface it is," Hunt says. "I don't sleep on the floor of my daughter's bedroom, like Colin's character, but if I let my fears about her off their leash, I'd be him. I'm everybody in that movie. Matthew Broderick's character is sort of, from April's point of view, a Peter Pan – and I've been that person. And I've certainly been April, although her situation isn't the same as my experience with my divorce. Basically, I feel all the characters deeply because they are parts of me."

The difficulty was that as a writer and director, Hunt was an unknown quantity with a cherished personal project in her briefcase – and in the modern, sceptical financial climate of film, it's tough to get a green light for those kind of pictures, no matter who you are.

"Being well-known got me in the room with people, but it didn't get them to say yes," says Hunt. "People don't write you a cheque because you were good in As Good As It Gets.

"But I asked someone who'd managed to get these small, hard-to-get-made-movies made, what his secret was. And he said, 'You don't give up.' And I thought, 'Well, I can do that.' Other things I'm very bad at. But I'm good at not giving up."

Hunt admits, however, that she was tempted to throw in the towel at least once, when her film was days away from shooting only for the finance to fall apart once again. But with each rewrite, she put more of her own experiences into the film. Not just as the leading lady, but the assertive birth mother; the hurt, divorced dad; the defending brother – making it harder for her to abandon it.

Eventually one company agreed to sign on, saying "We won't give you a big cheque, but we'll give you a cheque, and we won't tell you how to direct it or who to hire."

As it turned out, Hunt found a stellar cast to lean on, although she says she paused before casting Firth as the male lead, fearing that his dry wit and charm would suck some of the tension out of the will-they, won't-they relationship: "I think I was afraid and he was afraid that he's so appealing that the minute he comes on screen you'd stop worrying about April – like she'll be fine, she's going to end up with him. I actually wrote the part for someone much less tall, handsome and appealing.''

Cast as her unappealing, immature damp lettuce of a husband, is Broderick. Despite the fact that Hunt and Broderick had dated for two years, she says the casting caused "zero drama, zero awkward anything. He has been such a mensch. Although us having bad sex in the car was very funny because it wasn't a closed set and who knows if anyone thought we were getting back together."

The role of April was originally intended for Sigourney Weaver 10 years ago, but Hunt says there was a good reason why she finally ended up playing the lead in her own film. "I had 27 days to make the movie and I literally don't think I could have made it with another actor in the part,'' she says. "Warren Beatty said to me, 'If you act in it, you'll have at least one person in the movie that will see it the way you do'.

"As time went by, I realised it was true. I couldn't have made another actor work all night and not sleep. I couldn't have made her change in the middle of the street and run to the next location, and I didn't have time to explain the movie to more than one person in each scene. I also realised: "It's a good part. I want to do it."

It's also a role that shows that Hunt is an actress of little personal vanity. To interview, she is all business, crisply dressed, little make-up, fine intelligent eyes and concise and exact in what she wants to say. On screen, she takes the lead in showing people at their best and worst in Then She Found Me. Broderick is whingey. Firth is allowed to be angry. Midler doesn't sing (or overact, Hunt dryly notes). And Hunt shows herself looking bone-weary, her face pinched and her eyes sunken, unburdened by Hollywood's typical inch-thick layer of make-up.

"I wanted her to be tired, look older, like she'd suffered a lot of challenging things," she says with a small smile. "But I also thought, 'I'll never make this movie if I worry about lighting me well or getting me into hair and make-up.' It was a relief to only have one woman who needed to look glamorous – and it wasn't me." v

Then She Found Me is released on September 19 www.thenshefoundmefilm.com