Anjelica Huston
☼ Born on 8 December 1951, in Santa Monica, California, USA
Biography
Anjelica Huston was born on July 8, 1951 to director and actor John Huston and Russian prima ballerina Enrica 'Ricki' Soma. Huston spent most of her childhood overseas, in Ireland and England, and in 1968 first dipped her toe into the world of show business, taking on the lead role of her father's movie A Walk with Love and Death (1969). However, before it was released, her mother died in a car accident, at 39, and Huston relocated to the United States, where the very tall, exotically-beautiful young woman modeled for several years.
While modeling, Huston made sporadic cameo appearances in a couple films, but decided to pursue it as a career in the early '80s. She prepared herself by reaching out to acting coach Peggy Feury and began to get roles. The first notable part was in Bob Rafelson's remake of the classic noir movie The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) (in which Jack Nicholson, with whom Huston had been living since 1973, was the star). After a few more years of on-again, off-again supporting work, her father perfectly cast her as calculating, imperious Maerose, the daughter of a Mafia don whose love is scorned by a hit man (Nicholson again) in his 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 (her father and grandfather Walter Huston) had also won one.
Huston thereafter w
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orked prolifically, including notable roles in Francis Ford Coppola's Gardens of Stone (1987), Barry Sonnenfeld's film versions of the Charles Addams cartoons The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993), in which she portrayed Addams matriarch Morticia, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). Probably her finest performance on-screen, however, was as Lilly, the veteran, iron-willed con artist in Stephen Frears' The Grifters (1990), for which she received another Oscar nomination, this time for Best Actress. A sentimental favorite is her performance as the lead in her father's final film, an adaptation of James Joyce's The Dead (1987) -- with her many years of residence in Ireland, Huston's Irish accent in the film is authentic.
Endowed with her father's great height and personal boldness, and her mother's beauty and aristocratic nose, Huston certainly cuts an imposing figure, and brings great confidence and authority to her performances. She clearly takes her craft seriously and has come into her own as a strong actress, emerging from under the shadow of her father, who passed away in 1987. Huston married the sculptor Robert Graham in 1992. The couple lived in Venice Beach until Graham's death in 2008.
In the role of actor
The Addams Family (10/10/2019)
The creepy and kooky family return for a new animated adventure in The Addams Family. Following their wedding, Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and Morticia Addams (Charlize Theron) are forced by torch-wielding villagers out of the old country and have to find a new place to call home. Arriving in New Jersey, Gomez and Morticia take shelter […]
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (20/05/2019)
The hunter becomes the hunted in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. After committing an unsanctioned killing in the New York City Continental, John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is declared “excommunicado” and a $14 million bounty is placed on his head by the High Table, though the Continental’s manager Winston (Ian McShane) gives John an hour […]
The Family (11/01/2018)
The survivors of the most infamous cult in Australia speak about their experience in The Family. The Family was an apocalyptic sect in Australia formed by Anne Hamilton-Byrne in the late 1960s. The membership of the cult included a large number of children, who were both the offspring of members and acquired through adoption scams. The […]