Acting Career
In 1950, while a graduate student in radio at the University of California, Los Angeles and appearing in a college play, he was spotted by talent scouts and offered a two-year motion picture contract by 20th Century-Fox that was eventually extended to 1959. He made his Hollywood debut in Fourteen Hours, had star billing by Red Skies of Montana (1952), and first billing in Sailor of the King (1953).
A loan-out to co-star with John Wayne in the title roles of the now-classic western The Searchers began the first of three pictures he made with director John Ford; the other two being The Last Hurrah (1958) starring Spencer Tracy and Sergeant Rutledge (1960). The same year as The Searchers, Hunter also co-starred with top-billed Fess Parker in Walt Disney's The Great Locomotive Chase, based on an actual 1862 historical event during the American Civil War. Ironically, according to Parker's Archive of American Television interview, Ford had originally wanted to cast Parker in Hunter's role in The Searchers but Disney refused to loan him out, something Parker didn't hear about until years later; Parker referred to his loss of that part to Jeffrey Hunter as his single biggest career setback.
Ford also recommended Hunter to director Nicholas Ray for the role of Jesus Christ in the biblical film King of Kings (1961), a difficult part met by critical reaction that ranged from praise to ridicule (Hunter's youthful matinee idol looks resulted in the film being derided as "I Was a Teenage Jesus" despite his being 34 years old during shooting). Among an all-star cast in the World War II battle epic The Longest Day, he provided a climactic heroic act of leading an ultimately successful attempt to breach the defense wall atop Omaha Beach in Normandy but dying in the process.
Having guest-starred on television dramas since the mid-1950s, Hunter was now offered a two-year contract by Warner Brothers that included starring as circuit-riding Texas lawyer Temple Lea Houston, the youngest son of Sam Houston, in the NBC series Temple Houston (1963–64), which Hunter's production company co-produced. Jack Elam was his co-star.
Although Temple Houston did not survive its first season, Hunter accepted the lead role of Captain Christopher Pike in "The Cage," the first pilot episode of Star Trek. Hunter declined to film a second Star Trek pilot requested by NBC in 1965, and decided to concentrate on motion pictures such as Brainstorm. The footage from the original pilot was subsequently adapted into the later series in a two-part episode entitled "The Menagerie," despite continuity differences in the way Leonard Nimoy portrayed Mr. Spock due to alterations in the character's appearance and personality between filming the first pilot and the eventual series. Later that year, Hunter filmed the pilot for another NBC series, the espionage thriller Journey Into Fear, which the network did not pick up.
With the demise of the studio contract system in the early 1960s and the outsourcing of much feature production, Hunter, like many other leading men of the 1950s, had to find work in B movies produced in Europe, Hong Kong, and Mexico, with the occasional television guest part in Hollywood.
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