After her short break, Helen Hunt came back with a bang. "Everybody around you says, 'But you've worked so hard to get to this point, what is your follow-up thing?' But you can't control whether something wonderful comes along after something like [the Oscar win] happens," she told Female.com.au at the time. 

Luckily, plenty of projects did come along — and though she may have craved more time off, some of them were too good to pass up. "For years I dreamed of having the kind of career where I could work with the best in the business, and now that I had the opportunity, I didn't have the guts to turn any of the films down," she explained in an interview with Cinema.com. "I told myself that I could always rest later."

In the space of just one year, she appeared in Robert Altman's "Dr. T & the Women" with Richard Gere and Farrah Fawcett, "Pay It Forward" with Kevin Spacey, "Cast Away" with Tom Hanks, and Nancy Meyer's "What Women Want" with Mel Gibson.