Talk About Connected Four films with four heavyweight actors. Sounds like clout, but to Helen Hunt, it's about bonds--to her characters, to the world.

By AMY WALLACE

Sept. 10, 2000 12 AM PT

Amy Wallace is a Times staff writer

Imagine it: Helen Hunt, blond mane crunched under a dorky hat, haggling with a teenager she’s never seen before. The setting: the Olympic Games in Atlanta. The topic at hand: one of those little enamel pins that geeky people affix to their hats and neckties and lapels at big events like the Olympics. Among the geeks and proud of it, it may surprise you to learn, is Helen Hunt.

“At the Olympics, it’s all about these pins--for Hungarian team handball or Fuji film. I was obsessed with them,” she says, enjoying telling the story. “I had this experience over and over where a kid would come and ask for my autograph. And I’d say, ‘OK, but give me your Swatch pin.’ And he’d go, ‘No way!’ So I’d say, ‘All right, I’ll give you my Motorola pin and an autograph for your Swatch pin.’ And suddenly, you’ve poked a hole in the ‘You’re playing the part of the guy who wants my autograph and I’m playing the famous person’ thing. Once in a while, you can poke through and actually connect with somebody.”

Hunt says this one day in early August, several weeks before heading off to the Olympics again, this time in Australia. Sitting in her comfy West Hollywood office in Sunset Plaza, she explains that she’s such a fan of the Games that in 1998, during contract negotiations for her final season of the long-lived TV series “Mad About You,” she made tickets to the Olympics a part of her deal with NBC, which broadcasts the Games. As much as the athletics, though, what makes Hunt’s gray-green eyes flash is the overwhelming vastness of the event.

“It makes you feel connected to the world,” she says emphatically. “That’s so rare. So rare. This is a global thing, and you just want to die, you’re so happy to be there. It’s like during Oscar time [this year], people asked [director] Sam Mendes why people liked ‘American Beauty.’ He said, ‘I don’t know what to say.’ But I said, ‘I do. It makes people feel less lonely.’ The Olympics are like Sam Mendes’ movie: You’re less lonely.”

Geeky. Lonely. Oscar-winning. At first, the three don’t seem to mesh, especially since they describe an actress whose beauty--though frequently underestimated as merely “accessible”--can be ravishing in its strength and authenticity. Someone once said of Hunt that she was never an ingenue, and it’s true. Her looks--the high forehead, the long hair--have always been more Meryl Streep than Winona Ryder. And in more than one movie, including “As Good as It Gets,” for which she won an Academy Award for best actress in 1998, she’s appeared downright plain.

Lately, it seems the 37-year-old has grown into herself, appearing not just at home in her own skin, but reveling in its golden glow. But it is her eagerness to explore what she calls the “unglamorous” or “messy” facets of life that fuel her acting. And in four upcoming movies, she’s about to prove just how messy she can be.

Next month, Hunt stars opposite Kevin Spacey and Haley Joel Osment in “Pay It Forward,” about a boy who thinks up a simple idea that just might change the world: Do three big favors for three people, and ask them to pass it on. Sources say Hunt was paid $8 million to play the boy’s single mom, a Las Vegas cocktail waitress with an alcohol problem. She has never portrayed anyone with a harder edge. Hunt’s crimped platinum hair, acrylic nails and bad eye makeup only lay the foundation for a performance so fierce that one key scene had to be re-choreographed to make sure Hunt didn’t hurt anyone.

“When I met Helen, I said to her, ‘I want this character to lead with her breasts.’ She jumped right in,” director Mimi Leder said of Hunt’s low-cut, midriff-baring wardrobe in the film. (Both her clothes and her performance are likely to remind audiences of Julia Roberts’ sexy working-class heroine, Erin Brockovich.) “We tried to tell these people’s stories in a very unconventional way, and Helen didn’t hold anything back.”

Also in October, Hunt plays a golf pro who is Richard Gere’s love interest in director Robert Altman’s “Dr. T & the Women”--an ensemble piece that lets Hunt try on a role usually reserved for men: sexually aggressive, aloof and wary of commitment. (“I’m the guy who blows him off,” Hunt says, referring to the gender-bending part. Gere, she recalls, “was [People magazine’s] ‘the Sexiest Man Alive’ the week I was doing those love scenes with him. I was like, ‘I’m the one who’s supposed to be sexually confident? Help!’ ”)

In December, Hunt appears as Tom Hanks’ girlfriend (a woman, she says, “who hasn’t quite found her voice yet”) in director Robert Zemeckis’ “Castaway”--the tale of a Federal Express executive who survives alone on an island for four years. The same month, Hunt shifts gears in “What Women Want,” a romantic comedy about a male chauvinist advertising executive (Mel Gibson) who suddenly can read women’s minds. Hunt plays Gibson’s chief rival, a sexy, smart ad whiz whom he inadvertently falls for while trying to steal her innermost thoughts.

Hunt is more than funny in the role. She is luminous, happy-looking and even warm--a quality that has not always been in evidence, even during her seven-year stint as America’s favorite TV wife. She laughs when it’s suggested that the joyful Helen Hunt has been hard to find amid the many tired women she’s portrayed. “That is so true,” she says. “I’ve been playing tired people. That is hilariously true.”

Hunt is buoyant in “What Women Want,” even taking to the dance floor with Gibson at one point for a jitterbugging session that will surely join “Scent of a Woman’s” tango and “Pulp Fiction’s” freestyle in the recent pantheon of romantic hoofing.

“It’s goofy, it’s romantic, but it’s honest,” Hunt said of the playful scene in which she and Gibson mug to Frank Sinatra’s “Come Dance With Me.” The routine was tightly choreographed, but writer-director Nancy Meyers asked the actors to improvise one take, and that’s the one--complete with ad-libbed smooching and silliness--that made it into the film. “Mel is a miracle,” Hunt said. “It’s crazy how much fun we had. I screamed at one point, we were having so much fun.”

Ticking off the most memorable characters of Hunt’s 28-year career, fun isn’t necessarily a common thread. In 1992’s “The Waterdance,” Hunt’s Anna was a conflicted adulterer, struggling to care for her wheelchair-using lover (Eric Stoltz). In 1996’s “Twister,” her Jo Harding was a no-nonsense scientist, capable but brittle. In 1997’s “As Good as It Gets,” her Carol Connelly was more richly conceived--ferociously protective of her ailing son but awkward in her attempts to take care of herself. In the words of Jack Nicholson’s character, Melvin, Carol is a woman who “you make her laugh, you’ve got a life.” But fun?

Even Jamie Buchman, Hunt’s half of the beloved couple in TV’s “Mad About You” (with Paul Reiser), was rarely easygoing or lighthearted. But that was OK with Hunt, who felt that one of the show’s strengths was that it dared to tangle with the thorny questions that arise in real long-term relationships. And Hunt would rather seem real on screen than anything else.

Sometimes it has cost her. Having started acting in TV shows at age 9, then graduating to made-for-TV movies (she’s done 16 of them), she had trouble at first being taken seriously in the movies. And her “real” look was one of the strikes against her.

“What does that mean? ‘Accessible beauty.’ ‘Women aren’t afraid of you’--like because I’m not pretty enough to scare them? [Expletive] say it! It’s horrible. Whatever,” she says and laughs. Hunt is sitting on a plump white couch in the office she uses to read, write and think. A line drawing Yoko Ono made of her hangs on one wall, as does a still photo from the first movie she ever saw, Charlie Chaplin’s “The Circus.” The photo was a gift from her father, director and acting coach Gordon Hunt, who still remembers his daughter’s reaction to the film: She worried that Chaplin was left alone in the end.

Dressed this afternoon in green surfing shorts, a gray tank top, Birkenstock sandals and a beaded anklet around her left ankle, Hunt looks natural, unstudied and still fabulous--as if she’s stepped from the pages of a J. Crew catalog. And oddly, the fact that Hunt evokes a well-known ad campaign may not be entirely coincidental.

American women have taken a liking to Hunt’s looks, and advertisers have taken notice--with one Chicago firm, Leo Burnett USA, even using her to illustrate the nation’s new definition of beauty in an in-house report. The report, called LeoShe, interviewed real women and found they mentioned Hunt again and again.

“Helen is the out-of-the-stratosphere role model--the unbelievably distinct, far-reaching woman that women would love to be,” said Meyers, who found the LeoShe report as part of her research for “What Women Want.” “She’s a knockout. But it’s not some kind of pretend, fake, hard-to-relate-to beauty that nobody is. You can’t get tired of looking at that face.”

But when asked about the LeoShe study, which Meyers had shown her months before, Hunt looks no happier than when she was being described as allegedly nonthreatening.

“James Taylor has a thing I heard him say at one of his concerts. Somebody in the audience yelled, ‘I love you, James.’ And he just took a pause and said, ‘Thanks. It helps not to know me,’ ” she says. “You know, it’s all people’s projection, even if the projection is a little bit correct. I do it too--I go to the movies, I see performances, and I say [to an actor], ‘You! You get me!’ And all they can do is say, ‘I’m glad it was nice for you.’ ”

The message is clear: Hunt’s fans do not know her, not truly. And as much as she relishes the rare moments when she has connected with strangers, she has no intention of helping them try to know her. She refuses to talk about her love life. The news that she and her longtime romantic partner and husband of one year, actor Hank Azaria, were separated broke on the day she was interviewed by The Times, for example, but she did not address the topic.

“You can’t do this famous dance, which I’m choosing to do, and not have to deal with the personal and the public crashing into each other all the time,” she said during a general discussion of privacy. Of keeping her romantic life off-limits, she said, “It feels so wrong to have it on the table that it accomplishes it to have it off [the table]. That’s all you can get.

“I think I’m a weird combination of deeply introverted and very daring,” Hunt added later. “I can feel both those things working.”

Meyers sits in a small editing room, watching Hunt and Gibson fall in love. In the scene unfolding on a large monitor, the camera focuses on the couple talking in the candle-lit booth of an Italian restaurant. Hunt tells Gibson she feels he is reading her mind. Gibson says he doesn’t need to mind-read because she usually says what she thinks.

“That’s a Helen note. Right there,” Meyers announces, stopping the film. “I had written Mel’s line, ‘You say what you think.’ But Helen said, ‘I’m not sure I actually do that enough in the movie.’ So I added more examples of her thinking something, then saying it.”

In addition to Hunt’s comedic talents and her confident bearing on screen (“You don’t have to put glasses on Helen Hunt,” said Meyers, “to believe she’s a smart person”), Meyers came to value the actress’ writerly brain.

“She embraces good ideas in a way that’s thrilling. And she pushed me to another level,” Meyers said, recalling that during the shoot, Hunt repeatedly encouraged her to rewrite key scenes--to realize their full potential by exploring the messiness of human emotion. “Did I love writing scenes over and over while I was also directing? No. But at her urging, I ultimately think I did really good work. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. I would not have done it without her.”

When told of Meyers’ comments, Hunt is startled. Although the director is known to be generous with praise, Hunt is still surprised to receive credit for her kibitzing. “It’s so rare that anybody ever admits that,” Hunt says, touched. “Because I do that all the time, but nobody ever says, ‘That’s what makes her good.’ ”

Clearly, Hunt believes that her meticulousness is essential to her success. Still, not everybody responds so positively. There are many tales of Hunt’s deconstructionist approach to acting--what the actress calls her “detail-y-ness.” She doesn’t so much read a script as unravel it, testing whether each beat truly leads to the next, searching--always searching--not just for what the characters, as written, are doing and feeling, but for what they ought to do and feel. Hunt sees this as necessary. Others, though not eager to criticize her on the record, admit that sometimes it just feels difficult.

James L. Brooks, who directed Hunt in her Oscar-winning role, has said that Hunt is motivated by enormous respect for the process. “It’s not ego,” he has said. “Helen’s the other side of ego--genuine humility.” But even in her own descriptions, the way she honors the work sounds like it can be wearing.

On “Pay It Forward,” for example, the rehearsal period at times became a script autopsy, with Hunt, Spacey, Osment and his father, Leder, producer Steve Reuther and two writers (Leslie Dixon and Barra Grant) pulling apart every single scene.

“We’d read through a scene and you’d say, ‘I’ve got six questions. Why is he showing up now if in the last scene he said this?’ And we’d all sit there and go, ‘Hmmmm. What if he didn’t do that?’ ” said Hunt, who credited Leder with fighting to get the time for such discussions to take place.

Hunt also pushed the envelope during the “Pay It Forward” shoot. Her interest in doing the film, in addition to working with Spacey, was that “it had the potential to take on sort of the biggest question there is: Is the world [crap]? That’s what this miraculous boy [Osment’s character] asks.” She was determined that her portrayal would be “dark enough and light enough to at least make it a worthy exploration.” So when it came time to slap Osment in the face--a pivotal scene upon which the plot of the movie turns--she fought to make it stronger.

“We shot the scene and we all thought we had it. They were striking [the set] to move into the next shot, and I got halfway to my trailer and I just had that thing in my stomach that told me it wasn’t right,” Hunt recalls. “I said to Mimi, ‘I don’t think it’s brutal enough.’ And she called her editor down, and her editor and I and Mimi looked at it and he agreed: It wasn’t brutal enough. It scared me to death, but I knew it needed to be more brutal than it was safe for me to do as a stage slap. So we staged the scene a different way.”

Leder is pleased with the results.

“She had a lot of nerves exposed during this movie, because she had to go there,” she said of Hunt. “She did very brave work because she allowed herself to have those feelings.”

Gibson said Hunt’s insistence on feeling deeply works as well in comedy as in drama.

“When I read the [“What Women Want”] script, I thought, ‘Helen is the only person who could pull this off.’ She has to convincingly be someone who is so good that she actually changes the guy with the power of goodness. And that’s who I see her as,” he said. “She’s not a prima donna. She’s there to give. And she’s serious about giving. She’s very conscientious and Spartan-like about the way she approaches work. And it bears fruit, because when most people would be inclined to stop and say, ‘This is in pretty good shape,’ she goes deeper. She doesn’t settle for less than extraordinary.”

Hunt prides herself on following her gut. After years of struggling to break out of TV, Reiser asked her to read the “Mad About You” pilot. She liked it, so, although she knew some might label her a TV actress again, she did it anyway. She worked in movies throughout the show’s tenure and during the last season was pulling in $1 million per episode. Similarly, the first role she agreed to do in the wake of her Oscar win was a cameo in Zemeckis’ “Castaway.” But again, following her instincts paid off.

“I was having lunch with Bob about another thing and he said, ‘I’m going off to an island with Tom Hanks to make a movie.’ And I said, ‘I want to be in that movie.’ Not thinking there was even a part, but thinking, ‘I haven’t heard this idea before. It sounds bold to me.’ ”

She signed up, and eventually the cameo turned into not a huge part, but a more complicated one that--while she has yet to see a finished cut of the movie--she seems proud of.

“When you choose to do something based on your instincts, in a way nothing can hurt you too badly, because you’re on your own path and it was an honest choice,” she said.

What will she choose next? You heard it here first: Helen Hunt wants to do a musical someday. She also is trying her hand at screenwriting, working with “Mad About You” veteran Vic Levin to rewrite a script based on Elinor Lipman’s book “Then She Found Me,” about an adopted woman who reconnects with her birth mother. She and her producing partner and longtime manager, Connie Tavel, are developing several scripts for her to either star in or direct, including an adaptation of Jen Sacks’ novel “Nice,” about a woman who would rather kill men than break up with them. She is also working with the “Spenser for Hire” writer Robert B. Parker to create a female detective character for the big screen.

“You try to stay close to what you really want. You say, ‘I choose to create the following,’ which for me happens to have a lot of elements: work on the stage, work as a director, work as an actress, work as a writer. Not necessarily in that order,” she said. “I wish there were six of me, because I have that much of an appetite just for the professional side of my life, not to mention the other side.”

It’s good she’s voracious, because Hunt is in demand on stage and screen. She starred in a production of “Twelfth Night” at Lincoln Center a few years ago and hopes to do more classical roles. And she got a call recently she says she’d waited for her whole life--the call to star in a Woody Allen film. OK, not from Allen himself, but close enough.

“A woman came to my hotel in New York and gave me a script and said, ‘I’ll be downstairs while you read this and then I’ll take it away.’ I read it, gave it back and said, ‘OK. Yes, please,’ ” Hunt said. “I’ve never met him. Ever. Even a little. I saw him at a Knicks game, on the other side of the court. I really don’t think that counts. But I’m about to do a movie where he and I are the leads. What, you’re going to say, ‘I could have, but I didn’t?’ ”

But before Allen’s project starts shooting in October, Hunt plans to head to Australia for the Games.

“I don’t know if you can walk off a plane and onto a Woody Allen set, but if you can, I’m going to do it,” she said. “That Olympic spirit thing they talk about is no joke. It really exists. It’s as much fun as I’ve ever had.”