Entertainment

Godmother

THE GODFATHER, 1972 (
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Linda Hunt is becoming the Betty White of TV drama.

The 4-foot-9 “NCIS: Los Angeles” star has found a loyal new audience in the most unlikely of places: high schools. “I have no idea how this happened,” says Hunt, 67, who has been honored two years in a row at Fox’s Teen Choice Awards. “I have a surfboard that says ‘Linda Hunt Choice TV Actress: Action.’ I am an action star! I don’t know what that is about, but I like it.”

An Oscar winner in 1982 for her portrayal of male dwarf photographer Billy Kwan in “The Year of Living Dangerously,” Hunt owes much of her newfound popularity to TV alter-ego Hetty Lange. As OSP Operations Manager for the NCIS unit, Hetty is the type of character that could just as easily have stepped out of a James Bond movie. She’s a pint-sized lover of Lady Gaga, who speaks of winning Olympic medals and romancing Frank Sinatra _ and yet possesses the ninja-like sharp-shooting skills to assassinate a mobster without leaving her seat.

“Hetty is all the things I wanted to be when I was growing up,” Hunt tells The Post. “I aspired to be extremely sophisticated. And Hetty is a woman like that. I am sort of living of living out my childhood fantasies in playing her.”

Hunt has described much of that childhood as being “miserable.” The daughter of an oil executive and a piano teacher, she was born in Morristown, NJ and raised an only child in Westport, Conn. Afflicted with a chromosomal genetic disorder called Turner Syndrome, the actress says she was often teased by her classmates.

“These days, there are some teenagers out there who actually think that what Hetty is doing is cool and what Linda Hunt is doing is cool,” she told the Daily Beast in 2011. “I love that.”

When TV’s second most-watched drama returned for its fourth season last Tuesday, Hetty appeared to be exiting the NCIS unit and contemplating retirement. “But I think maybe we have to admit that the old girl is going to stick around a while longer,” she says. A source close to the show tells The Post that next month Hetty and the team will investigate the murder of an individual working on a US Senate campaign. “Hetty is sort of a political addict of sorts,” Hunt says.

In stark contrast, Hunt is unapologetically private and “quite retiring.” She grants few interviews and prefers to spend her time away from work with her partner of nearly three decades, psychotherapist Karen Klein. The pair were married in 2008, but “what that means legally, I don’t know,” Hunt admits. “And remember, legal is only legal in California.”

Hunt began her career in East Coast theatre productions before eventually becoming a familiar face on hour-long procedurals like “The Practice,” “The Unit” and “Without A Trace.” “People are always casting me for what they call my authority,” she says.

That ability to command respect and take control of a scene is a fortunate by-product of growing up “literally under people’s elbows,” she says. “I was always trying to make up for my size, to compensate. So to get people to take you seriously, you have to come at things with a great deal of strength. You have to emphasize that the way you are is unusual. That you don’t come along every day.”