Prominent on New York and other stages. Appeared in Peter Brooks' THE CHERRY ORCHARD at Brooklyn Academy of Music in the late 1980s, and starred as Aunt Dan in AUNT DAN AND LEMON on Broadway in the mid 1980s.
The first actor to have won an Academy Award portraying a member of the
opposite sex, she won the Best Actress in a Supporting Role Oscar for
her role as Billy Kwan in O Ano que Vivemos em Perigo (1982). Note this was not Linda Hunt playing
a woman pretending to be a man, like Barbra Streisand did in Yentl (1983) or, in
reverse, as Dustin Hoffman did in Tootsie (1982), but Hunt playing a man in a serious
drama.
Everybody either wanted to take care of me or push me around, you know? I was teased a lot, sure I was, of course. Fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, everybody was taking their spurts except me. I was not growing up.
