©Associated Press  September 12, 2002 

Oscar-winner Kim Hunter dies at 79

The actress was best-known for her award-winning role as Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire. 

NEW YORK -- Kim Hunter, the versatile actor who won a supporting Oscar in 1951 as the long-suffering Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire and appeared in three Planet of the Apes movies, died Wednesday, September 11th, 2002. She was 79. 

 She died in her Greenwich Village apartment from an apparent heart attack, said her daughter, Kathryn Emmett. 

Shy and modest, Miss Hunter enjoyed a long, busy career in theater, radio, and television, less so in films, partly because she was blacklisted during the red-hunting 1950s and didn't fit the sexpot pattern for female Hollywood stars. 

A Streetcar Named Desire (she was Stella in the stage and screen versions) provided the highlight of her career. She told the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1999 that after she left Streetcar, she tried to avoid seeing the play with other casts. 

"It's simply that I have no objectivity about it," she said. "It was so much a part of my life, it would be unfair to the productions and performers." 

 Her subsequent films were few, among them: Deadline U.S.A., as newspaper  editor Humphrey Bogart's estranged wife; Anything Can Happen, as Russian immigrant Jose Ferrer's wife; Storm Center, a minor film starring Bette Davis; The Young Stranger; Bermuda Affair, and Money, Women and Guns.
 Her screen career entered a lull in the late '50s after Miss Hunter, a liberal Democrat, was listed as a communist sympathizer by Red Channels, a red-hunting pamphlet that influenced hiring by studios and TV networks. 

Her return to film was Lilith (1964), which starred Warren Beatty, Jean Seberg and Peter Fonda. 

Four years later came Planet of the Apes. 

She was cast as Dr. Zira, a chimpanzee psychiatrist in the science-fiction classic about a group of astronauts from a ruined earth who discover a future world ruled by apes, with humans as slaves. She spent hours having the makeup and monkey suit applied and removed. 

"It was pretty claustrophobic and painful to a certain extent," she told a reporter in 1998. "The only thing of me that came through was my eyeballs." 

 She was intrigued enough with the character and the plots that she appeared in two sequels, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) and Escape from the  Planet of the Apes (1971).