Anjelica

These days, Huston is 54 years old, and though her face is softer than it was, with laughter lines fanning out from the mouth, there are no visible nips or tucks. “Oh God, the midlife crisis. We call it the end-life crisis,” she says, throwing her head back with a deep, rolling laugh. Her voice has the timbre that comes from smoking (which she gave up some years back) and fine wine, with long vowels and rolling Rs born of breeding. “There’s a myth that you get a second act, that 50 is the new 30. Yeah, right, buster! Eternal youth doesn’t exist. Nor does eternal beauty. You can’t hold back the years.”

Perish the thought. Huston’s years have been way too eventful to miss. She was born in California, but grew up in Galway, Ireland, where her film-director father, John Huston, bought an old castle in which to stow his young fourth wife and their two children, while he went off to make epic films with the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart. Huston came of age in London in the 1960s and early 1970s, when it was renegade and swinging. She modelled for Vogue, knew everybody and was at the centre of things when fashion and pop culture were going through their seismic shifts.

In the early 1980s, she began acting full-time, winning an Oscar for the role of a sultry mafioso’s girlfriend in Prizzi’s Honor and playing the dark, sexual foil to Hollywood’s best bubbly blondes in films such as The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Grifters and Crimes and Misdemeanors. She did Morticia Addams, and the matriarchal Etheline in The Royal Tenenbaums. She has been prolific and serious-minded, and is spoken of in reverential tones in LA.

I tell her I like the fact that she found success in acting relatively late, when she was 34. Too often you get the feeling that if you aren’t a star in your chosen career by your mid-twenties, you’ve missed out; that every minute after 25 is another one past your peak. “Yes, it’s strange,” she agrees. “When I was growing up, we were all taking our cues from women in their late thirties. These days, the role models are 17, 18. I think, though, we all come into our power at different times.”

Power comes from confidence, of course, and Huston’s was always a slippery animal, even when she was being photographed by Richard Avedon and David Bailey, feted by the Rolling Stones and partying with Warren Beatty and Roman Polanski. “I was confused about why anyone would want to photograph me,” she says. “I never felt like a beauty. I thought people wanted me to model for them because I was my father’s daughter. Then later, when it came to acting, my problem was that the ideal of beauty in the mainstream didn’t look like me; the mainstream looked like Cybill Shepherd. I had to work out where I fitted in.”

Physically, Huston is the kind of type-A female that is feared by a certain kind of lily-livered male (possibly the sort that would describe her as “craggy”). With a face as striking as hers atop a 6ft frame and a clever brain, there is no “sweet little me” fall-back position, nothing to hide behind when you feel vulnerable or feel like feeling vulnerable. Perhaps that explains why she has spent her life around strong men, men who are comfortable in their macho personalities. I ask her who she went out with when she was single. “Bad boys. Cool boys. Actors, musicians, cowboys. Not bankers or lawyers.”

There’s strong and there’s strong, of course. Huston’s flamboyant genius of a father, a member of the “If you don’t have anything interesting to say, don’t say anything” school of parenting, was strong. The naughty, capricious movie star Jack Nicholson, who she was with for 17 years, was strong too. That she lived in their shadows for longer than she should have is tacitly understood.

Both she and Nicholson were unfaithful, though Nicholson more so. She finally ditched him when she discovered that his 26-year-old mistress, Rebecca Broussard, was pregnant with his child. Huston had been trying for a baby for years. She’s never said much publicly about Nicholson. She isn’t cagey, just discreet — and sanguine about what she calls “the human sexual imperative”.

“People get outraged because Brad left Jennifer for Angelina,” she says. “Well, you know what? I feel awful for the injured party, but how can you blame anyone? I think, in a lot of relationships, there’s an arrangement, that they get along very well and adore each other, but that he or she has an interest. You just have to make sure that your priority is to not hurt the one you love.”

Sure, but Huston was hurt. How galling must it have been, after their split, to see Nicholson out on the town with all those dolly birds — Broussard, Kate Moss, Lara Flynn Boyle? “Men are largely drawn to women who look young,” she says wryly. “Genetically, they are conditioned to like women who are cute and sweet. Like puppies.”

Huston knows she is in the minority among her age-obsessed acting peers for not having yet said yes to the surgeon’s scalpel. “I don’t disapprove of it for others, but for me ... Oh, that draping effect when the skin is pulled too tight. I’ve got this girlfriend who, when I hug her, has these two hard bullets on her chest, and I find it such a turn-off. No. I don’t believe in it. I really don’t think you can cheat time.”

By now, we are well into our second glass of fizz. I scrabble around in my bag for a book I’ve been reading, called Are Men Necessary? by the New York journalist Maureen Dowd. Dowd says that narcissism has trumped feminism, that women have become so fixated with the idea of physical perfection that they don’t know who they are any more and they don’t know what men are any more.

“Yes, I think it’s true,” says Huston. “It’s an improvement that women now have a sense of self-worth that doesn’t rely on men. But there’s no doubt that they are still dressing for the opposite sex. It’s just that now the aim is to look great, while also looking like you don’t care. There’s a kind of dismissiveness about the whole dance, as if it doesn’t matter, even though everyone knows it does. It’s harder than ever.”

Huston must be relieved to not be dancing the dance any more. Two years after splitting from Nicholson, she married the sculptor Robert Graham, with whom she lives in LA’s Venice Beach. Their life together — they have another house upstate, where she reads and rides and looks after her chickens, dogs and cats — sounds lovely.

“There are fleeting moments in life when you say, ‘Ah, right now, I’m truly happy,’” she says, flinging her long arms up in the air to illustrate. “I’m much happier now that I have ever been in my life. I just feel better in my skin.”

28 Days of Oscar runs throughout February on TCM. Anjelica Huston hosts her favourite movies at 3pm on Tuesdays and 9pm on Sundays. For details, visit www.tcmonline.co.uk