‘Invaders From Mars’ Star Was 85

Jimmy Hunt, the freckle-faced youngster who appeared in Pitfall, Sorry, Wrong Number, Cheaper by the Dozen, Invaders From Mars and 31 other features before he retired from acting at age 14, has died. He was 85.

Hunt suffered a heart attack six weeks ago and died Friday in a hospital in Simi Valley, his daughter-in-law Alisa Hunt told The Hollywood Reporter.

Hunt played William Gilbreth, one of the 12 offspring of an efficiency expert (Clifton Webb) and a psychologist (Myrna Loy), in Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), then returned to play another son in the family, Fred, in the sequel, Belles on the Toes (1952).

As an orphan, his character fueled the plot in The Mating of Millie (1948), a charming romantic comedy starring Evelyn Keyes and Glenn Ford, who taught him how to shoot marbles on the set. And in The Lone Hand (1953), Hunt portrayed the son of a widowed farmer (Joel McCrea) and served as the film’s narrator in what he said was one of his favorite acting experiences.

Hunt’s onscreen parents included Jane Wyatt and Dick Powell (in 1948’s Pitfall), Claudette Colbert (1949’s Family Honeymoon), Ronald Reagan (1950’s Louisa), Teresa Wright (1950’s The Capture) and Patricia Neal (1951’s Week-End With Father).

He also played Margaret O’Brien’s brother in Her First Romance (1951).

His most memorable role, however, came as David MacLean in the cult sci-fi classic Invaders From Mars (1953), directed by famed production designer William Cameron Menzies.

In the movie — made in about 3 1/2 weeks for less than $300,000 — David spies a flying saucer from his bedroom and notices his dad (Leif Erickson) acting weird. Then he’s sucked underground, where he encounters a Martian and his green humanoid accomplices aboard the saucer. But was it all a dream? Gee whiz!

In Tobe Hooper’s 1986 remake of Invaders, Hunt came out of retirement to play a police chief. As he approaches a hill where the flying saucer may have landed, he says, “I haven’t been here for 40 years.”

It was the only movie of his career for which he received residuals. “Every once and a while, the Screen Actors Guild sends me a check for like nine dollars,” he said with a chuckle in 2022.

James Walter Hunt was born in Los Angeles on Dec. 4, 1939. An MGM scout visited his second-grade class at his Culver City school, which was located mere blocks from the studio, and that led to the 6-year-old redhead playing a kid version of Van Johnson’s Navy pilot in High Barbaree (1947).

Placed under contract, he would appear in five films released that year, then another eight in 1948 as he attended MGM’s Little Red Schoolhouse, where his classmates included Roddy McDowall and Elizabeth Taylor.

“We were strictly lower middle-class people,” Hunt said in 1986. “Actually, that’s the way we stayed. As long as [his parents] were satisfied that I was getting a good education, the acting was all right.”

In Cheaper by the Dozen, his character, William, weeps as he informs his siblings that their dad has died.

During the making of the movie in Seal Beach, California, his real father “was working for a company, and he went back to Kentucky to open a plant for them back there, and he was gone for a couple of months,” he recalled at the 2022 Cinecon Classic Film Festival. “In my mind, I saw him coming home on a plane and the plane crashing. So I could get myself worked up.”

His big-screen résumé also included Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), starring Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster (Erickson played his dad in that, too); Fuller Brush Man (1948), starring Red Skelton; Rusty’s Birthday (1949), the last in the Columbia Pictures series about a boy and his German shepherd; The Sainted Sisters (1948), starring Veronica Lake; Top O’ the Morning (1949), starring Bing Crosby; Shadow on the Wall (1950), starring Ann Sothern; and She Couldn’t Say No (1954), starring Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons.

“I took my little lunch pail and I went to work each day, and the director told me what he wanted me to do,” he said in a 2017 interview.

While filming Douglas Sirk’s Week-End With Father, Hunt broke his arm rehearsing a potato-sack race with Van Heflin but kept working, he said. “No one made me finish the picture that way. I wanted to,” he recalled. “I considered myself a professional. In other words, I never had any really bad times as a boy actor.”

After Invaders was completed, Hunt — who said he was paid about $4,000 for his work on the movie — was called back to film some new scenes for its U.K. release, as censors there did not approve of the original ending. 

It turned out that Invaders was the last straw.

“The older I got, the more serious I became about getting a scene right on the first take,” he said. “Adult actors all made jokes when they blew their lines. Kids just feel dumb when it was their fault. So acting became harder for me all the time.”

At the ripe old age of 14, Hunt “decided that I would rather play sports in high school than make movies, so I retired,” he explained. He went to college and served for three years in the U.S. Army, intercepting and breaking code.

Later, he served as a sales manager for an industrial tool and supply company in the San Fernando Valley that serviced aerospace firms.

He said he was still getting mail from Invaders fans some 70 years after it first hit theaters.

Survivors include his wife, Roswitha, whom he met in Germany while in the Army and married in January 1963; his sons, Randy and Ron; another daughter-in-law, Christina; nine grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.