Anjelica Huston

Anjelica Huston
Huston at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability's An Evening of Environmental Excellence in March 2014
Born	(1951-07-08) July 8, 1951 Santa Monica, California, U.S.
Education	Holland Park School
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1967–present
Spouse(s)	Robert Graham Jr. (1992–2008; his death)
Partner(s)	Jack Nicholson (1973–1989)
Parent(s)	John Huston Enrica Soma
Relatives	Danny Huston (half-brother) Allegra Huston (half-sister) Jack Huston (nephew) Walter Huston (grandfather)

Anjelica Huston (/ˈhjuːstən/; born July 8, 1951) is an American actress, director and former fashion model. Huston became the third generation of her family to win an Academy Award, when she won Best Supporting Actress for her performance in 1985's Prizzi's Honor, joining her father, director John Huston, and grandfather, actor Walter Huston. She also received Academy Award nominations for Enemies, a Love Story (1989) and The Grifters (1990).

Huston received British Academy Award nominations for her work in the Woody Allen films Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). Among her other roles, she starred as Morticia Addams in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993), receiving Golden Globe nominations for both, and played the Grand High Witch in the children's movie The Witches (1990). She has frequently collaborated with director Wes Anderson, including The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). She is also the author of two memoirs; A Story Lately Told and Watch Me.

Early life

with father John Huston, circa 1960

Anjelica Huston was born in Santa Monica, California, and is the daughter of director and actor John Huston and Italian–American prima ballerina and model Enrica Soma.^[1] Huston's paternal grandfather was Canadian-born actor Walter Huston. Huston has Scots-Irish, English and Welsh ancestry from her father.

She spent much of her childhood in Ireland, particularly near Craughwell, County Galway, and England, where she attended Holland Park School.^[2] In the late 1960s, she began taking a few small roles in her father's movies. She started very small indeed, substituting her hands for Deborah Kerr's in the British Casino Royale and advanced to bigger roles in 1969, starring, for example, in A Walk with Love and Death, where she played the 16-year-old French noblewoman Claudia. In the same year, her mother, who was 39 years old, died in a car accident, and Anjelica relocated to the U.S., where she modeled for several years. While she modeled, she worked with photographers such as Richard Avedon and Bob Richardson.^[3]

Huston has an older brother, Tony, a younger maternal half-sister named Allegra, whom she called "Legs", a younger paternal half-brother, actor Danny Huston, and an adopted older brother, Pablo. She is the aunt of Boardwalk Empire actor Jack Huston.^[4]

Career

Acting career

Deciding to focus more on movies, in the early 1980s she studied acting. Her first notable role was in Bob Rafelson's remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). Later, her father cast her as Maerose, daughter of a Mafia don whose love is scorned by a hit man (Jack Nicholson) in the film adaptation of Richard Condon's Mafia-satire novel Prizzi's Honor (1985). Huston won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance, making her the first person in Academy Award history to win an Oscar when a parent and a grandparent had also won one.

Huston earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a con artist in Stephen Frears' The Grifters (1990). She also starred as the lead in her father's final directorial film, The Dead (1987), an adaptation of a James Joyce story.

She was then cast as Morticia Addams, in the hugely successful 1991 movie adaptation of The Addams Family. In 1993, she reprised the role for the sequel Addams Family Values. Anjelica also starred in the 1998 Hollywood blockbuster, Ever After: A Cinderella Story alongside Drew Barrymore and Melanie Lynskey as the Baroness Rodmilla De Ghent. She starred in two Wes Anderson films, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), as well as appearing in a minor role in 2007's The Darjeeling Limited. She voiced the role of Queen Clarion in the Disney Fairies film series starring Tinker Bell. On January 22, 2010, Huston was honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2011, Huston was in the film Horrid Henry: The Movie. Huston later appeared on the NBC television series, Smash, portraying Broadway producer Eileen Rand.^[5]

Directing career

Huston has recently expanded her horizons, following in her father's footsteps in the director's chair. Her first directorial credit was Bastard Out of Carolina (1996), followed by Agnes Browne (1999), in which she both directed and starred, and then Riding the Bus with My Sister (2005).

Political activism

Huston in 2005.

In November 2007, Huston led a letter campaign organized by the U.S. Campaign for Burma and Human Rights Action Center. The letter, signed by over twenty five high-profile individuals from the entertainment business, was addressed to the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and urged him to "personally intervene" to secure the release of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma.^[6]

Huston's biggest donation has been a yearly commitment to Transgender Law Center for over a decade. TLC has a growing number of locations throughout California.

In December 2012, Huston recorded a public service announcement for PETA, urging her colleagues in Hollywood to refrain from using great apes in television, movies and advertisements.^[7] Later, the animal rights organization named her their Person of the Year 2012.^[8]

Personal life

In 1969, at age 18, Huston began dating photographer Bob Richardson who was 23 years her senior. Their relationship lasted almost four years.^[9] She met Jack Nicholson in 1973 and they lived together, on and off,^[10] from that year until 1990, when the media reported he had fathered a child with Rebecca Broussard. She was briefly involved in a relationship with Ryan O'Neal during one of her separations from Nicholson in the late 1970s.^[9]

On May 23, 1992, Huston married sculptor Robert Graham. The couple lived in a five-story house designed by Graham at 69 Windward Avenue in Venice, California, until his death on December 27, 2008. They did not have any children.

Huston's home went on the market for $18 million in 2010, but initially failed to sell. In September 2012, the New York Post reported that Huston was planning to transform her house into a private social club;^[11] the actress was said to have accepted $12 million for the property and to serve on the advisory board for a new private club to be based there.^[12] In April 2014, Huston sold the house for $11.15 million.^[13]

Huston was close friends with actor Gregory Peck, whom her father directed in Moby Dick (1956). The two of them first met on the set of the film when she was four years old as Peck was in costume as Captain Ahab. Decades later, after her father's death, Huston reunited with Peck and maintained a friendship that lasted until his death.^[14][15]

Huston wrote her memoirs as one 900-page book; she split it into two books at her publisher's urging.^[16]

Filmography

Film

Television

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Books

• Huston, Anjelica (2013). A story lately told : coming of age in Ireland, London, and New York. New York: Scribner.  Also published in London by Simon & Schuster.
  • — (2014). A story lately told : coming of age in Ireland, London, and New York. Paperback reprint. New York: Scribner. 
• — (2014). Watch me : a memoir. New York: Scribner. 

Critical studies, reviews and biography

• Jones, Lewis (4 January 2014). "Blazing saddles". Books. The Spectator 324 (9671): 24–25.  Review of A story lately told.

Awards and nominations

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Anjelica Huston.

• Anjelica Huston at the Internet Movie Database
• Anjelica Huston at the Internet Broadway Database
• Anjelica Huston at the Internet Off-Broadway Database