Last year, in the UK and Ireland, 53% of all cinema tickets were sold to women, the gender that Hollywood forgot. This comes as a great relief to the Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt, the writer, director and star of Then She Found Me, a very traditional woman’s picture. All told, it has taken her ten years to get this, her directorial debut, up and running.

“When I was making the film I was looking to a lot of simple, human stories like Kramer vs. Kramer and Truly, Madly, Deeply,” Ms. Hunt tells me. “But nobody is making those films anymore. Nowadays, small films were people talk to each other are definitely the most challenging to get made. But you have to believe that everything cycles around, and they’ll have their time again.“
Then She Found Me follows a New York schoolteacher (Hunt) through a series of mid-life crises. In quick succession her husband (Matthew Broderick) leaves, her adoptive mother dies and her biological mother (Bette Midler, still divine), a brassy chat show host, shows up out of the blue. Worse, she falls pregnant by Mr. Wrong just as she’s getting to know Mr. Right (Colin Firth).
“I got exactly the cast I wanted,” says the director. “Exactly. I’ve known Matthew for 20 years so I was just able to call him up. And I really admire all those actors in spite of their celebrity, not because of it.”
Then She Found Me has been a long time coming for Helen Hunt fans. Apart from a cameo role in the 2006 ensemble piece, Bobby, their heroine has barely graced our screens since 2001. Mostly, she says, this is down to an extended baby break following the birth of her daughter, Makena Lei, in 2004.
That hiatus leaves a strange looking blank space on a busy CV that stretches back to the early seventies. Born into a bi-coastal showbusiness family (dad Gordon was a film director, mom Jane, a photographer) the 45-year-old first came to prominence as a child actress on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. As an adult, she was already known to television audiences for roles in Bill: On His Own and St. Elsewhere when, in 1992, she landed the lead in Mad About You.
“I was often a fan of the show before I started working on it,” she says. “But it gets so normal that you stop noticing your idols. Though when I worked on Bobby, I do remember looking around at Anthony Hopkins and Sharon Stone and Lindsay Lohan and thinking, ‘Where in hell am I?’.”
A gargantuan hit, Mad About You would see Hunt take home Emmy Awards for her performance in 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. In the wake of her Oscar win for 1997’s As Good As It Gets, there were further box office hits and a guest spot on The Simpsons opposite her then husband, Hank Azaria, but she subsequently suffered the slings and arrows of the tabloid press when, in 2000, her marriage came to a reputedly acrimonious end. One senses that this very public ordeal has impacted on her return to film.
“I spent a lot of time reading an essay by the Jungian writer James Hillman called Betrayal,” she says. “I think that’s what the movie is ultimately about; it’s about betrayal. You can’t really love until you’ve made peace with betrayal. That was the North Star for me.”
Happily, Ms. Hunt has since found a life partner in Dirt creator, Matthew Carnahan, her companion since 2001.
“We knew each other for years,” she tells me. “And one day we just bumped into each other on the street and got talking. And I guess we haven’t stopped talking since.”