Linda Hunt: A towering talent

(CBS News) LINDA HUNT won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role as a MAN in the 1982 film "The Year of Living Dangerously." These days she's pursuing her craft on the set of a popular TV series, which is where Lee Cowan found her for this Sunday Profile:

She's hard to see on set sometimes -- lost amid the chaos of a busy day of shooting.

But once the camera finds Linda Hunt -- she nearly always steals the scene.

She plays Hetty Lange, the diminutive cloak-and-dagger boss who's in charge of the undercover federal agents of "NCIS: Los Angeles."

Linda Hunt (Hetty Lange) and Chris O'Donnell (Special Agent Callen) in "NCIS: Los Angeles."

/ CBS

At 67 -- and just 4 feet 9 inches tall -- Hunt spends her days surrounded by actors who are half her age, and almost twice her height. But she says she has rarely felt so much at home.

"I do like it. I get a kick out of it!"

And the younger set gets a kick out of her, too. In fact, Hunt has taken home the Teen Choice Award for Best Actress in an action series the last two years in a row.

Her stage is a massive two-story set at Paramount Studios, where attention is paid to every prop, no matter how small. She showed Cowan a plastic cow "with a lot of correct anatomical things!"

Her sense of humor makes for a playful atmosphere backstage. There's even good-natured teasing, especially over the one thing she has and her co-stars don't: an Academy Award.

"They tease me about the Oscar, about having won the Oscar. But sweetly!" Hunt laughed.

"What is there to tease about winning an Oscar?" Cowan asked.

"Well, you know that I'm the only one who has it. And would I bring it to work?"

It was her performance in "The Year of Living Dangerously" that won her that Oscar back in 1984.

Hunt plays Billy Kwan, a male photojournalist who's hired by a rookie foreign correspondent in Indonesia, played by a young Mel Gibson.

Never before had an actor won an Oscar for playing the opposite sex.

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Linda Hunt

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She was so convincing as a man audiences were shocked when the credits rolled.

"I can't be a man. But I can embrace the head of a man, the intelligence of a man, the spirit of a man," Hunt said.

"Did you ever feel you'd get lost in him, that character?" Cowan asked.

"Yeah, yeah. When I ordered dinner up at the end of the day's shooting. I'd come back to my beautiful room and a guy would bring me dinner and refer to me as 'sir.' It was upsetting. It was upsetting. You say, did I get lost in it? And it was weird not to be able to turn it off, not to be able to come home at night and just be Linda."

But the transformation was worth it -- not just because it won her an Oscar, but because it settled the nerves of Hunt's parents, especially her father, who thought teaching might be a better career choice.

"I think up until I won that night, he always worried," Hunt said. "It was proof from people he didn't know, from a world he didn't know, that his baby girl was going to be all right."

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