A precociously talented youngster, New Jerseyite Helen Hunt was trained for the arts at Michigan's Interlochen School and at Chicago's Goodman Theater. From age ten, Hunt was drawing paychecks as a TV actress; before she was 17, she had appeared as a regular on two series, Swiss Family Robinson (1975) and The Fitzpatricks (1977). Hunt proved she was more than just a workaday kid actress with her starring performance in the fact-based 1979 TV movie The Miracle of Kathy Miller, in which she played a high school athlete who overcame severe mental and physical damage brought on by a highway accident. While she had been appearing in films as early as 1977's Rollercoaster, Hunt was never groomed as a star player; it is possible that her close resemblance to another child actress, Jodie Foster, held her back from more important roles.

After taking on her first adult role in the 1982 sitcom It Takes Two, Hunt's film assignments improved, with sizable roles in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Project X (1987) and Next of Kin (1991); she gained a small measure of cult status by appearing in a brace of sci-fi films, Trancers 2 (1991) and Trancers 3 (1992). In 1992, Hunt landed her longest-lasting acting assignment to date, as co-star of the Paul Reiser-created comedy series Mad About You, with which she has earned Emmy and Golden Globe awards. In 1997, Hunt received a Best Actress Oscar for playing a caring waitress and single mother who befriends acerbic, obsessive-compulsive author Jack Nicholson (who also won an Oscar for his role) in As Good As It Gets.