AS SHE strides into the Dorchester hotel suite, the imposing craggy features of Anjelica Huston are instantly recognisable. But she also talks with an engaging mix of vulnerability, pride, intelligence and something velvety, poised and oddly elusive. Jack Nicholson called it “class”.
The 53-year-old actress is in London to promote the director Wes Anderson’s maritime farce, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (see reviews), starring Bill Murray. But in another sense she is also coming home. Born in California but raised in rural Ireland, the young Huston then spent her “wild child” teenage years in 1960s London. Both places left deep impressions.
“I think of Ireland as home,” she says, “and I think of London as home too. All my close friends are people I have known since I was young. Home is where your friendships and your loved ones are.”
The Life Aquatic also brought Huston back to Europe, shooting along the Italian coast with other veterans of Anderson’s bittersweet 2001 ensemble comedy, The Royal Tenenbaums. Like Murray, she seems to have been adopted as one of the quirky director’s repertory company.
“Although Wes would seem very self-effacing and mild mannered, we’ll break our back to please him,” she says. “We’ll follow him wherever he leads us, like a really good general.”
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Like The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson’s latest film is a ruefully funny reflection on dysfunctional families in autumnal decline. Once again, Huston has been cast as the stern matriarch. Last time, before playing the archaeologist Etheline Tenenbaum, she studied photographs of Anderson’s real-life archaeologist mother and even wore some of her glasses. All of which sounds unnervingly Freudian.
“We were speaking on the phone and I said, ‘Wes, am I playing your mother?’, ” Huston recalls. “And he said, ‘Why would you think that?’ Haha! So I’m still not sure if I’m playing his mother.”
Whatever his true intent, Anderson is not the first director to view Huston in maternal terms. The pugnacious Vincent Gallo also cast her as a lightly disguised parental surrogate in his autobiographical feature debut Buffalo ‘66, then bitterly attacked her in interviews afterwards.
“Vincent called me a very ugly name in the press,” she sighs, “for which I can only express resentment. But I have to say that, on the set, he was very good. He’s capable of doing good work, it’s just a pity his resentments get in the way. I don’t think he gains any friendships from that kind of name-calling and frankly I don’t think I deserved it.”
Although she began acting in her teens, Huston hit her stride only in her thirties and forties in emotionally raw, sexually explicit roles: her desperate, spurned lover in Crime and Misdemeanours; her incestuous con-trickster mother in The Grifters; her camp Morticia Addams in the Addams Family comedies; her sinister matron in The Witches.
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More recently, younger auteurs such as Anderson seem to have cast her for something else. A kind of bruised, soulful integrity, perhaps. Or maybe just sheer class.
“I’ve been pretty lucky,” she admits, “and I’ve worked with some great people. Some of the older ones, like my father and Nic Roeg, had that kind of regenerative quality.”
Huston must be bored to tears with interviews comparing her career to that of her legendary actor-director father, John. But she mentions him first and often with great fondness. He clearly remains a guiding spirit almost 20 years after his death. After all, he directed her ill-starred 1968 debut, A Walk with Love and Death, and half a dozen more collaborations, including Prizzi’s Honour, which won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1986.
“Obviously there have been advantages in that I had a leg-up into the film industry at the age of 16,” she says. “The disadvantage is that I got horribly reviewed. My father was accused of nepotism and I was simply accused of being bad! Haha! Also I had a bit of a complex about things being given to me because of my parentage rather than of my capabilities, so that was a personal hurdle I had to get over.”
John Huston also introduced his daughter to Jack Nicholson in the early 1970s, initiating a long, public relationship. They shared the screen several times during 17 stormy years, but Huston left for good in 1990 after Nicholson fathered a child with the actress Rebecca Broussard. The old lothario claimed to have felt betrayed by the split, yet the former lovers acted together again in Sean Penn’s 1997 drama The Crossing Guard. Playing embittered divorcees, the anger in their scenes felt uncomfortably real.
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“It was scripted,” she says blankly, “and also, quite frankly, there is no reason why Jack should feel rage towards me. You don’t live with, and love, someone for 17 years and then turn against them, I don’t think. There’s too much water under the bridge, one has still a deep knowledge of the other person. I love and respect Jack, and we remain friends.”
Soon after leaving Nicholson, Huston married her current husband, the sculptor Robert Graham. They have a farm in California, no children but plenty of animals.
She also began directing, and recently finished her third feature, Riding the Bus with my Sister, a TV movie. A third collaboration with Anderson has been mooted, set in India, and other projects are in gestation.
“Yes, I am ambitious,” Huston admits. “Is it the career I would have wanted? Yeah, I’ve played some great parts. But I see it as an ongoing thing, I’m not exactly going to sit back and relax on my laurels, because those are intangible. I always feel that I’m as good as my next film, not as good as my last.”