Marsha Hunt, the longest-lived of the 41 women listed in Red Channels in 1950, died last week.
Along with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, John Huston, and Katherine Hepburn, Hunt joined the Committee for the First Amendment, a group the grew out of attacks on the Hollywood writers, producers, and directors who became known as the Hollywood Ten and challenged the House Un-American Activities Committee's attacks on progressives in the film industry.
Unlike the Hollywood liberals that sister blacklistee Lillian Hellman wrote about in her memoir, Scoundrel Time, Hunt never backed down in her support. Although not a communist, in a 2004 interview, she said, “You know, I was never interested in communism. I was very much interested in my industry, my country and my government. But I was shocked at the behavior of my government and its mistreatment of my industry. And so I spoke out and protested like everyone else on that flight. But then I was told, once I was blacklisted, you see, I was an articulate liberal, and that was bad. I was told that in fact it wasn’t really about communism — that was the thing that frightened everybody — it was about control and about power."