A Day in The Life - Anjelica Huston

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Things she loves: Salsa dancing, cigarettes, her sculptor husband. Things she loathes: Facelifts, bras, stationary bicycles.Kim Masters tracks a day in the life of Anjelica Huston. (A Day in the Life).

07:30 On the boardwalk. Anjelica wakes every morning to light stealing into her curtainless bedroom. She slips on a pair of Persol shades and heads for the beach where she walks Billy, her dog, along the Venice Boardwalk.Things she loves. salsa dancing, cigarettes, her sculptor husband Things she loathes:facelifts, bras, stationary bicycles. Kim Masters tracks a day in the life of Anjelica Huston.

Despite her fame–her iconic cheekbones and a visage reminiscent of a Picasso–the actress doesn't cause a stir. "I say hello to everyone on the boardwalk," she says. "All my dog-walking friends and the various denizens. They know me, [but] they never point and they're never obnoxious. I have a really nice, easy time with people for the most part."

Anjelica and Billy go as far as the Venice Pier. Then they turn back toward the house, where Anjelica's husband, sculptor Robert Graham, is waiting to have breakfast with his wife.

08:15 The fortress. Robert is sitting on one of the deck chairs by the black-bottomed lap pool, reading the paper. One tipsy evening, before they were married almost 10 years ago, Anjelica told her husband that if he expected her to leave the Hollywood Hills for Venice, he had to design them a house that was "a convent inside and a fortress outside." That is exactly what Robert did, building a compact three-story structure around a flower-filled courtyard on one of Venice's narrow lots.

Not a fan of breakfast, Anjelica has a few pieces of fruit just so she doesn't skip the meal altogether and heads back inside.

She showers and slips on eggplant-colored trousers and a white button-down shirt from the Gap. She dislikes wearing bras, and doesn't bother with one today. Seated before her mirror, she reaches for her jar of Creme de la Mer. She recently tried the cult cream on the New York set of her upcoming movie, The Royal Tenenbaums. "It really works–it lifts and plumps your whole face," she says. Anjelica likes to try all kinds of creams and potions, though she favors Kiehl's products and Art Luna for haircare. She dusts on T LeClerc powder and a little Giorgio Armani blush from a "delightifil package" of goodies that she recently received from the people at Armani.As for the idea of going under the knife like so many of her Hollywood contemporaries, Anjelica (who celebrated her 50th birthday this year) says, "You have to decide if you want to look the way plastic surgery makes you look. I don't think it makes you look younger. It makes you look tighter and less wrinkled." Besides, she adds, "more often than not you have only to look at somebody's hands to reckon how far along they are. I don't know that a facelift is going to make me look a lot younger … and personally, I fear pain.

"There were times when I hated my nose," she admits, laughing. "But I knew my father would murder me if I got a nose job!" At this point, she's glad she left it alone. "Sooner or later, it's yours," she says. "You have an affection for it even though it might not be your favorite nose in the world…. You grow up and you start to recognize that maybe it wasn't a bad thing that you weren't born Barbie."

09:00 Anjelica's ashes. Anjelica has a steaming mug in her hand and a grimace on her face. She's drinking her daily Chinese tea, as prescribed by her acupuncturist. "It's got a heavy base note of elm and licorice," says the actress, who hopes it will treat a painful case of carpal tunnel syndrome, which she believes she developed from too many hours at the keyboard. ("I do love e-mailing," she says. "I'm much fonder of it than speaking on the telephone.")

"I'm always drinking some sort of brew or making some kind of motion toward health," she explains, as she takes another sip of tea. At the same time, she lights up a cigarette and acknowledges the contradiction with a smile.She tries to offset the effects of smoking, she says, with a healthy diet and exercise. "Cigarettes have been my best friend since I was a teenager," she says. She recently gave them up for a year, and during that year, she was "bitterly depressed." Her mood since taking up nicotine again? "Happy as a beaver." She'll try to quit again soon, she says–not convincingly.

Anjelica does not diet. "I eat what I like, but if I eat as much as I like, I have to exercise extra hard," she says. She does, however, subscribe to a few popular (some might say dubious) diet theories: She avoids mixing proteins and carbohydrates on the theory that such combinations make digestion difficult, and she warns against combinations like "hot beef fat and cold pop," which form "instant lard."

Sometimes Anjelica and Robert practice chi gong (a traditional Chinese system of low-impact exercises, one of which is tai chi). "I can never understand what [the instructor] is saying because he usually has his back to me," she says. "So I have to kind of approximate the moves as best I can." On other mornings, Anjelica practices ballet, yoga, and salsa with her dance teacher, Charles Valentino. "I'm not crazy about the gym," she says. "I like riding horses, walking, bicycling–things that get you from one place to another."

13:00 Lunch. The preferred mode of travel in L.A. is, of course, the automobile. But Anjelica prefers to hire someone to do the driving for her because she has a knack for getting lost. "The narcotic of the freeway kind of pulls you along at great speed," she confesses. "Sometimes I get a little tangled in that."

Fortunately, one of her favorite restaurants in Venice, the Globe, is within easy walking distance. This afternoon she's meeting her friend Darlene de Sedle, a jewelry designer.

"Robert called me," de Sedle tells Anjelica, when they're seated at a table. "'For Anjelica's birthday,' he said, 'I would like some rubies.'"

"My husband is well trained," Anjelica says contentedly.

"We're doing diamonds for Christmas," de Sedle continues, to Anjelica's obvious delight.

14:30 The sculptor's studio. After lunch, the actress walks over to visit Robert in his light-filled, white-walled studio. He is currently working on the monumental main doors for the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. He is as striking, in his way, as his wife, with a full head of curly salt-and-pepper hair, a goatee, and a cigar that seems permanently affixed to his hand. "If I had his hair, I'd be president," Anjelica says."I fell in love with his work before I fell in love with him."

15:00 Anjelica's office. Across the alley behind her house is Anjelica's skylit office, where her two assistants are busily preparing for press junkets for her latest film, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums.

There's a photograph hanging on the wall of a young Anjelica, eyes downcast, in conversation with her father, director John Huston, on the set of the 1969 film A Walk With Love and Death. Anjelica says the photo is a reminder of a painful time, when her father seemed particularly implacable. "Our relationship was confrontational on his part and shrinking on my part, she says. The image doesn't seem to be a happy one, but Anjelica says she likes to keep it on display. "It's a good reminder of life," she says simply.

Years later, she worked with her father far more successfully on the 1985 film Prizzi's Honor. By then, she says, she had grown into a confident actress who was capable of holding her own opposite the two powerful men in her life: her director father, and her Prizzi's Honor costar and real-life boyfriend, Jack Nicholson. As for the two of them, "they loved each other," she says dryly.

Anjelica's career is unusually busy at an age where good parts for women are notoriously hard to come by. "I don't necessarily look for big, fat starring roles," she says. "I look for something interesting that I can disappear into." And it doesn't matter much whether it's film or television: "You find a lot of strong female characters on television."

20:00 Kitchen confidential. Back at the house, Anjelica steps into her narrow kitchen, where a corner counter is piled high with ripe-smelling melons. She says she loves to cook (tonight it's pasta), and she'll try practically anything, except pastry. She recalls a frustrating experience from her days living with Nicholson: "I remember trying to make an apple pie up at Jack's once and getting so mad that I took the dough and flung it all over the kitchen. I've never tried it since."

22:00 In the bedroom. By the television in Anjelica and Robert's bedroom, there are videotapes of Valmont and Traffik–the British television miniseries that was the inspiration for Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. Robert is already in bed, watching TV.

The past few nights Anjelica has been absorbed in the bestseller Seabiscuit, about the legendary racehorse. "I like stories of courage and valor," she explains. The noise and light of the set don't disturb her at all. "Television kind of puts me to sleep," she says. "I just go down and out."