NEW YORK -- Anjelica Huston's mascara is so black and so thick that it makes her brown eyes seem hazel. Everything about her is full body, all six feet: big back, big hands, a nose that has known tragedy. "I was brought up a country girl," she says, "and New York is a far cry from the Irish countryside." This is the surprise of her, the shock. She's done up, made up, haute- glamour, curiously masculine and feminine and artificial -- and yet her voice betrays gentility and sorrow. She needed a lift after The Grifters, something light and fun after playing a con artist who kills her own son for money. Hence, The Addams Family and the role of Morticia Addams. The film broke all conventional, fall-opening weekend records with a $24.2 million gross this past weekend. For the role, besides the bluish-white pancake and charcoal eye shadow Huston wore a corset, press-on nails and eye-pulls -- "to give Morticia that sideways glance," Huston says. Her looks, she says, are the thing she worries most about -- not her performances, which have won her an Academy Award, choice roles and ceaseless praise from critics. "It depends on the movie," she says. "There was a time, particularly when I was starting out, that I would simply loathe how I looked, which was the main basis for any self-criticism. How I looked. But at a certain point, you grow into your face and your body and you don't so much despise your features as you do the onset of age." For years now, she has been a touchstone of refined sensibility, rare looks and good choices -- of father, of boyfriend, of clothes. She was a model for Diana Vreeland. She sat for Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton. When people wrote about Anjelica Huston over the years, they would talk about her legacy; her famous grandfather, actor Walter Huston; her famous father, director John Huston. They would write about her beautiful but tragically dead mother, Ricki Soma, a former Balanchine ballerina, herself the daughter of a well-known Italian restaurateur. And they wrote about Anjelica's boyfriend, Jack Nicholson; they saw each other for 17 years. She was born when her father was making The African Queen. (He received notice by messenger in the Congo.) When she was 10, her parents separated. When she was 16, her father insisted she star in his movie A Walk With Love and Death, despite her protests. It was a flop. While promoting the movie, her mother -- only 39 -- was killed in a car accident in France. In 1973, her stepmother took her to a party at Nicholson's house. It was the year The Last Detail came out, and the year he was to make Chinatown. They liked each other right away. "I can't come up with words poetic enough to describe her," Nicholson has said. "She has a very strong aura. She struck me as being stunning. Not pretty, but very beautiful in a powerful way. Deep class." She moved in with him almost immediately. "And when I was first with Jack, I didn't want to work," she says. She had small parts in The Last Tycoon and The Postman Always Rings Twice. After a serious car accident that broke her nose in four places, she reviewed her life and moved out of Nicholson's house, although she kept seeing him. Life seemed more precious suddenly, and she wasn't doing much with hers. She went to acting class. She was on Laverne and Shirley and performed in tiny theaters where nobody knew who she was. Then, her father directed her in Prizzi's Honor, and her life changed again. She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, and it seemed another Huston star was born. In 1987, after directing her again in The Dead, John Huston died. Last year, she broke up her 17-year relationship with Nicholson when she discovered that actress Rebecca Broussard was going to have his child. She had no idea, she says. She is engaged now, to Los Angeles sculptor Robert Graham. She never sounds bitter. "Well, I do think it would be pretty bad form," she says. "Maybe it's good manners, I don't know. ... I think it's down to you finally -- whether you want to do something. What you're after, what you're going for."
Comentários