Kim Hunter won an Oscar when she and Marlon Brando recreated their stage roles in the powerful 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. But in later life the bulk of her fan mail was for a film in which her features were hidden behind make-up - Planet of the Apes.

Like so many actors and actresses of her generation, Hunter's screen career was blighted by the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s when she was blacklisted. She never really embraced Hollywood and died on Wednesday at home in Greenwich village, New York, aged 79.

For an actress, she was unusually modest, sensitive, and some might say highly-strung, though she always seemed happy to chat with fans and reply to letters.

''I would say 99% of my fan mail comes from people who are talking about apes,'' she told me last year while I was researching a book on Planet of the Apes. She often received photographs of herself as a chimpanzee to autograph. ''It doesn't bother me... That's the film that they

just adored.''

Hunter was born Janet Cole, in Detroit, on November 12, 1922. Her mother was a concert pianist. She recalled a lonely childhood, picking characters out of books, pretending they were her friends, and acting out little scenes with them in front of the mirror.

She made her stage debut in her teens and her film debut in the 1943 Val Lewton thriller The Seventh Victim, in which she stumbles upon a group of devil-worshippers in New York.

A couple of years later she was reduced to acting out Ingrid Bergman's lines opposite actresses auditioning for minor roles in Alfred Hitchtcock's Spellbound.

It was Hitch who recommended her as female lead in the English classic A Matter of Life and Death, aka Stairway to Heaven, (1946). ''Sensible, pretty, could be the girl next door, can act, good voice, good legs,'' he told director Michael Powell.

Hunter played an American wireless operator and David Niven was the RAF pilot who falls in love with her voice, subsequently arguing with a heavenly court that his love be given a chance.

Back in the US, she landed the role of Stanley Kowalski's much put-upon wife Stella in the original stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947-49). The Kowalskis live in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Their lives are disrupted by the arrival of Stella's sister, Blanche DuBois, a faded southern belle, played by Jessica Tandy.

Brando and Hunter were part of the Actors Studio, the famous New York establishment that pioneered ''method'' acting in American movies and plays, the approach in which the actor seeks to become, rather than simply play a character. The immediacy and intensity of the acting and the passion of Tennessee Williams's drama had a huge impact on theatre audiences.

Brando had difficult relationships with many co-stars, but got on well with Hunter, nursing her through various personal crises, a recurring feature in her life. Hunter had married William Baldwin in 1944, with whom she had a daughter, but they divorced a couple of years later. She would later marry actor and producer Robert Emett and they had a son.

After a long run, the producers were lining up new actors for Streetcar. Hunter knew her understudy, Carmelita Pope, was going to be overlooked. ''You'll never get the part when I leave unless they see you do it,'' Hunter told her. Hunter faked illness to give the young actress her break.

Jack Warner did not want Hunter, Tandy, or Karl Malden in the film, dismissing Hunter as ''a negative screen personality''. Director Elia Kazan agreed to accept Gone with the Wind's Vivien Leigh as Blanche, but successfully held out for Hunter and Malden. Curiously, Brando, the man who virtually reinvented the craft of acting, was the only one of the four principals not to win an Academy Award.

It should have been the perfect springboard to movie fame and fortune for Hunter, but she lacked the sexuality of rivals and found it difficult to secure good leading roles.

She was the estranged wife of crusading newspaper editor Humphrey Bogart in Deadline USA (1952), and Russian emigrant Jose Ferrer's wife in Anything Can Happen (1952).

Her career stalled when her name appeared on one of the Hollywood blacklists for no other reason than a naive sense of social justice and attendance at a few meetings.

She made very few major films in the decade preceding Planet of the Apes (1968), in which Charlton Heston crash-lands on an unfamiliar planet where apes rule and humans are hunted. She got the role of the sympathetic chimp scientist Zira only after Julie Harris balked at the arduous make-

up process.

Valium helped Hunter to overcome feelings of claustrophobia during the four-hour sessions. Producer Mort Abrahams recalled her first day: ''She ran to me and threw her arms around me and cried and cried. She could not adjust at that moment to what was going on with

her visage.''

Planet of the Apes may have seemed like wacky fantasy-adventure, but Hunter studied chimp behaviour at Bronx Zoo to get into character. She went on to play Zira in two sequels and appeared in numerous television shows.

Ultimately, she made three classic films in three different decades, but the feeling remains that it could have been more, had she shown the ruthlessness that took others to the top.

Kim Hunter, actress; born November 12, 1922, died September 11, 2002.

BRIAN PENDREIGH