Her mother, Jane Elizabeth (née Novis), worked as a photographer, and her father, Gordon Hunt, was a film, voice and stage director and acting coach.

[7] Her early roles included an appearance on season 2, episode 3 of TV series "Family" (first aired Oct 26, 1976), playing Robin Trask, a classmate of Kristy McNichol.

Elsewhere as Clancy Williams, the girlfriend of Jack "Boomer" Morrison (David Morse), and had a notable guest appearance as a cancer-stricken mother-to-be in a two-part episode of Highway to Heaven.

She played the friend of an army brat in the comedy Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985), with Sarah Jessica Parker and Shannen Doherty, and appeared as the daughter of a woman on the verge of divorce in Francis Ford Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), alongside Kathleen Turner.

In 1990, Hunt appeared with Tracey Ullman and Morgan Freeman in a Wild West version of The Taming of the Shrew, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.

Hunt came to prominence in North America with the sitcom Mad About You (1992–99), in which she starred opposite Paul Reiser, as a public relations specialist and one half of a couple in NYC.

In 1995, Hunt played the wife of an ex-con living in Queens, alongside Nicolas Cage, in Kiss of Death, a very loosely based remake of the 1947 film noir classic of the same name.

Both actors were temporarily blinded by bright electronic lamps halfway through filming, and needed hepatitis shots after shooting in a particularly unsanitary ditch.

[15] Hunt went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress in the romantic comedy As Good as It Gets (1997), in which she took on the role of a waitress and single mother who finds herself falling in love with a misanthropic, obsessive-compulsive romance novelist, played by Jack Nicholson.

While the first featured her as one of the women that encompass the everyday life of a wealthy gynecologist, opposite Richard Gere, the second starred her as the love interest of a physically and emotionally scarred grade school teacher, played by Kevin Spacey.

In What Women Want, Hunt starred with Mel Gibson as the co-worker and love interest of a Chicago executive, and in Cast Away, she portrayed the long-term girlfriend of a FedEx employee marooned on an uninhabited island, alongside Tom Hanks.

Hunt starred in Woody Allen's The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), as an efficiency expert hypnotized by a crooked hypnotist into stealing jewels.

Despite the film's limited success, Roger Ebert asserted: "Hunt in particular has fun with a wisecracking dame role that owes something, perhaps, to Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday.

[23] Hunt made her feature film directorial debut in Then She Found Me (2007), in which she also starred as a 39-year-old Brooklyn elementary school teacher, who after years is contacted by the flamboyant host of a local talk show, played by Bette Midler, who introduces herself as her biological mother.

After first reading Elinor Lipman's novel, she tried to interest numerous studios in the material, and her unsuccessful efforts led her to begin writing the screenplay and raising funds to produce it herself.

[24] She's eons better and more realistic in this one [...] By directing Then She Found Me, Helen becomes its savior as well [...] Hunt knows when to rein in the Divine Miss M instead of allowing her to go into full Kabuki mode.

"[30] Hunt played research geneticist Mary-Claire King in the independent drama Decoding Annie Parker (2013),[31][32] which was released to a mixed critical response.

Rotten Tomatoes' critical consensus read: "Ride reaffirms Helen Hunt's immense acting talent —but suggests that she still needs time to develop as a director.

[38] In December 2020, it was reported that Hunt would appear in a leading role in the Starz series Blindspotting, created by Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal and based on their 2018 film of the same name.