Linda Hunt didn’t start on television. She was born in New Jersey, made her Broadway debut in 1975 in Ah, Wilderness!, and in 1980 played Mrs. Oxheart in Robert Altman’s Popeye. The role that made her was Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1983, the first person to win an Oscar for playing a character of the opposite sex.
After that came smaller parts, including Judge Zoey Hiller on The Practice. None of them stuck the way Hetty did.
Hetty
In 2009 she debuted as Henrietta “Hetty” Lange, operations manager of the Office of Special Projects on NCIS: Los Angeles. Hetty ran the agents, not the other way around. The show gave her a CIA career that ran through Germany, Afghanistan, and Russia, plus the kind of one-liners that made her a fan favorite fast.
Eric Christian Olsen, who played Marty Deeks, put it simply in 2019. “Linda Hunt is the ground that Hetty stands on.” Hunt told Entertainment Weekly in 2013 that kids latched on because Hetty was an underdog who kicked ass and told the truth. She won the Teen Choice Award for Choice TV Actress: Action in 2011 and again in 2012.
Her voice was already doing the same job off camera. She narrated the God of War games starting in 2005, as Gaia, and kept at it through Ascension in 2013. Kids recognized her from the game before they recognized her from CBS.
The crash, then the fade
In July 2018 Hunt was hurt in a crash in Hollywood while turning left. She called it minor and said she had no serious injuries. Recovery still took longer than she expected. She missed most of Season 10. Hetty was written as off in Washington. In November 2018 she told fans she had hoped to be back at the start of the season and would return later.
She did. Her late Season 10 entrance, crashing a car through a wall before Deeks and Kensi’s wedding in “Till Death Do Us Part,” was the kind of return the show was built for.
It didn’t last at full strength. COVID cut her availability. Her last on-screen appearance as Hetty was the Season 13 premiere, “Subject 17.” The show ran to Season 14. In the finale she was a recording and a letter. Callen and Anna got a honeymoon in Morocco and one last assignment. Executive producer R. Scott Gemmill said later he had hoped the ending would be a rescue mission to find Hetty, if Hunt had been available.
Now
Off screen, Hunt has been with Karen Klein since 1987. They married in 2008. In 2013 she told CBS she was already looking forward to a time when she didn’t have to work. In August 2025, at 80, she was spotted on a rare walk with Klein, in a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers.
The Oscar is still the award people cite. Hetty is the role people picture. Hunt spent more than a decade as the smallest person in the room and the one in charge, then stepped out of it.
