Anjelica Huston

Huston with her father John, circa 1960

Huston was born in 1951 in Santa Monica, California, the daughter of director and actor John Huston and prima ballerina and model Enrica Soma.[1] Huston's paternal grandfather was Canadian-born actor Walter Huston. Huston has Scottish, Scotch-Irish, English and Welsh ancestry from her father, and Italian from her mother. Her father became an Irish citizen in 1964.[2] She spent much of her childhood with him in Ireland, which she still considers home,[3] particularly near Craughwell, County Galway. She attended school at Kylemore Abbey.[4] Huston later lived in England, where she attended Holland Park School.[5]

Huston has a complex family because of her parents' multiple marriages. She has an older brother, Tony, and an adopted older brother, Pablo. She has a younger maternal half-sister named Allegra, whom she called "Legs"; and a younger paternal half-brother, actor Danny Huston. She is the aunt of actor Jack Huston.[6]

In the late 1960s, Huston began taking a few small roles in movies directed by her father. She began other small roles too; her hands were substituted for Deborah Kerr's in the British Casino Royale. In 1969 she starred in A Walk with Love and Death, where she played the 16-year-old French noblewoman Claudia opposite Assi Dayan. Huston had been in the running to play Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, but her father decided to cast her in A Walk with Love and Death. She had been reluctant to perform in that.[7] On set she clashed with her father, and critics derided her performance.[8][9]

That year, her mother died in a car accident, at the age of 39. The young Huston relocated to the United States, where she modeled for several years.[10] While modeling, she worked with photographers such as Richard Avedon and Bob Richardson.[11] In the early 1970s, Huston, with Pat Cleveland, Pat Ast, Elsa Peretti, Karen Bjornson, Alva Chinn, and others, became one of fashion designer Halston's favored troupe of models, nicknamed the Halstonettes.[12][13]

Huston in 2005

Huston led a letter campaign organized by the U.S. Campaign for Burma and Human Rights Action Center in November 2007. 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.[20]

Huston currently sits on the advisory council of Save the Chimps, the largest chimp sanctuary and rescue in history. Houston has narrated the educational video Save the Chimps History exposing the cruelty of chimpanzee abuse by laboratories, entertainment and the NASA program Monkeys and apes in space, which sent primates into space often resulting in death by impact and explosion.

In 1995, Huston donated $500 to the Irish republican political party Sinn Féin. She has also attended Sinn Féin events and supported Martin McGuinness in his bid for the Presidency of Ireland in 2011.[21]

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.[22] The animal rights organization subsequently named her their Person of the Year 2012.[23] In 2018, she donated her fur coats to the homeless and animal shelters.[24]

In her 2014 book A Story Lately Told, Huston refers to a sexual relationship with actor James Fox when she was a teenager. In 1969, at age 18, Huston began dating photographer Bob Richardson, who was 23 years her senior. Their relationship lasted almost four years.[25] She met Jack Nicholson in 1973 and they lived together, on and off,[26] from that year until 1990, when the media reported he had fathered a child with Rebecca Broussard.[25] During a split with Nicholson in the late 1970s, Huston dated Ryan O'Neal who allegedly assaulted her.[27]

Huston was an inadvertent witness in the Roman Polanski sexual abuse case in March 1977, when she encountered Polanski and his 13-year old victim by chance in the home of her then-boyfriend Jack Nicholson.[28] When authorities searched the house in connection to the accusations against Polanski, Huston was arrested for cocaine possession, but she was never charged because the search and seizure of her handbag had been illegal.[29] Although she had witnessed no abuse, Huston was subsequently embroiled in the publicity surrounding Polanski's trial as a rumored witness for the prosecution, though she was not ultimately called.[30]

On May 23, 1992, Huston married sculptor Robert Graham. The couple lived in a three-story[31] house, designed by Graham, at 69 Windward Avenue in Venice, California, until his death on December 27, 2008. She does not have any children.

Huston wrote her memoirs as one 900-page book, but she split it into two books at her publisher's urging.[32]

She was a close friend of actor Gregory Peck, whom her father directed in Moby Dick (1956). The two first met on the set of the film when she was four years old while 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.[33][34]

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;[35] 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.[36] In April 2014, Huston sold the house for $11.15 million.[37]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Anjelica Huston.

• Anjelica Huston on IMDb
• Anjelica Huston at the TCM Movie Database
• Anjelica Huston at the Internet Broadway Database
• Anjelica Huston at the Internet Off-Broadway Database