Her loss of life, from an unspecified sickness, was confirmed by Jenkins, her former husband.
Ms. Hunnicutt, an auburn-haired Texan from Fort Value, first gained discover for enjoying seductive ladies in Sixties sitcoms like “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Get Good,” and for portraying a mob-connected tv star within the 1969 movie “Marlowe,” reverse James Garner. When she moved to London that 12 months after her marriage to Hemmings, a British actor identified for starring in Michelangelo Antonionio’s “Blow-Up,” she sought alternatives to exhibit her vary as an actress, past the sexpot roles she had been provided in Hollywood.
“In California I used to be happening the trail of being constructed up on my appears. I really feel I used to be very fortunate to flee,” she advised the Guardian in 1974.
Earlier that 12 months, she had turned down a suggestion to play the feminine lead in a blockbuster display adaptation of “The Depend of Monte Cristo,” reverse Richard Chamberlain. As a substitute she took a low-paying half in a stage model of Émile Zola’s novel “Thérèse Raquin,” aiming to solidify her standing as a critical actress. “The day I die,” she defined, “I don’t want to be remembered as a girl Texan starlet with a great face.”
For years, nonetheless, Ms. Hunnicutt was identified to British viewers as the girl with “probably the most luminously lovely face on tv,” as Richard Final, a tv critic for the Day by day Telegraph, as soon as put it. Casting administrators sought her out for components that showcased her statuesque determine, and he or she was reportedly in line to be the primary Bond woman reverse Roger Moore, who was succeeding Sean Connery as 007 in “Reside and Let Die” (1973). By one account, she turned down the function as a result of she had not too long ago given beginning to her first son. (The half went to Jane Seymour as an alternative.)
Ms. Hunnicutt might be alluring in a single function, enigmatic within the subsequent. She delivered acclaimed performances in BBC historic dramas, notably because the enigmatic Charlotte Stant, the ex-mistress of a nobleman, in a 1972 adaptation of Henry James’s “The Golden Bowl,” and as Tsarina Alexandra, the spouse of Nicholas II of Russia, within the 1974 historic saga “Fall of Eagles.” She additionally carried out regularly onstage, together with because the title character in 1979 productions of “Peter Pan” and Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” and as authors Mary Shelley and Edith Wharton, whom she portrayed in performs that explored the intersection between every author’s life and artwork.
Late in her profession, Ms. Hunnicutt returned to america to look on the final three seasons of “Dallas,” the hit prime-time cleaning soap opera that led to 1991. She performed an understated Englishwoman — Vanessa Beaumont, a former flame of J.R. Ewing who had secretly borne his youngster — relatively than a local Texan like herself.
By then, she had made herself at residence in Britain following a tumultuous first marriage to Hemmings. Whereas he was an emblem of Swinging Sixties London, she was extra demure, dismissive of sexual liberation and keen on the conservatism that she present in components of her adopted nation.
“No false fingernails, no false eyelashes, your hair will be mussed up,” she remarked. “You’d by no means get away with that in Fort Value.”
An solely youngster, Virginia Gayle Hunnicutt was born in Fort Value on Feb. 6, 1943. Her father, an Military colonel, served within the South Pacific throughout World Warfare II and later oversaw an Military Reserve college in Fort Value. Her mom was a homemaker.
Ms. Hunnicutt studied theater arts on the College of California at Los Angeles, receiving a bachelor’s diploma in 1965. She was found by a expertise scout whereas performing in a neighborhood theater manufacturing, and in 1966 she made her movie debut with a supporting function in “The Wild Angels,” starring Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra.
Months later, she met Hemmings at a celebration at actor Peter Lawford’s residence on Santa Monica seaside. “It was instantaneous combustion,” she recalled.
Hemmings was selling “Blow-Up,” wherein he performed a suave trend photographer who inadvertently pictures a homicide. He would later describe Ms. Hunnicutt and him as “a poor man’s Taylor and Burton,” referring to the fraught relationship between actors Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton: “It was a Hollywood romance, but it surely wasn’t meant to final.”
The couple married in 1968, in a Beverly Hills wedding ceremony with singing by the Mamas and the Papas and an orchestra performed by Henry Mancini. Not lengthy after, Ms. Hunnicutt found that her husband was having an affair with Samantha Eggar, one in all his co-stars.
“It almost destroyed me,” she mentioned, though the couple stayed collectively lengthy sufficient for Ms. Hunnicutt to co-star with Hemmings in “Fragment of Concern” (1970) and to be directed by him in “Working Scared” (1972).
“He was probably the most charismatic human being I’ve ever met,” she advised the Telegraph in 2004, the 12 months after Hemmings’s loss of life at 62. “He had an urge for food for all times that was fairly irresistible. I used to be completely, totally in love with him. I didn’t suppose I might breathe if he wasn’t there.”
They divorced within the mid-Nineteen Seventies, and some years later she married Jenkins, who edited the London Night Commonplace and later the Instances of London. With him, she turned a fixture of the London social scene, internet hosting events at marquee buildings like St. James’s Palace and Battersea Energy Station. “Simon is a part of the institution,” she mentioned, “and as his spouse, I’m too.”
They divorced in 2009. Survivors embody a son from her first marriage, actor Nolan Hemmings, who appeared within the World Warfare II miniseries “Band of Brothers”; a son from her second marriage, Edward Jenkins; and 5 grandchildren.
Ms. Hunnicutt’s different credit included roles within the horror movies “Eye of the Cat” (1969) and “The Legend of Hell Home” (1973), in addition to within the thriller “Goal” (1985), with Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon. She additionally starred with Jeremy Brett within the 1980 premiere of ITV’s “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” because the crafty American singer and actress Irene Adler.
Away from the stage and display, Ms. Hunnicutt wrote “Well being and Magnificence in Motherhood” (1984) and edited a number of love letters, “Dearest Virginia” (2004), that her father had despatched to her mom throughout World Warfare II. She found the letters whereas cleansing out her household’s residence in Fort Value and mentioned they provided solace, bringing her nearer to her late father and revealing the depth of his dedication to her mom, whereas she recovered from a years-long sickness following a hysterectomy.
“I got here to know my very own set of values and code of dwelling via studying them,” Ms. Hunnicutt mentioned. “They aren’t essentially the norm within the relatively unique, advanced worlds I’ve been a part of in my grownup life.”
