ANJELICA HUSTON PAUSED AND STUDIED a charcoal drawing of a woman in profile. The scene was the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the 37-year-old actress was taking an afternoon off from working on Woody Allen's latest movie to see the Degas show. The drawing was of a handsome, dark-haired, strong-featured woman with a long, aristocratic nose. The handsome, dark-haired, strong-featured Huston smiled. ''Great nose,'' she said.
Huston might be excused a moment of symbolic self-admiration. For a long time, she didn't much like the way she looked. Maybe it had something to do with the way the world looked at her: Anjelica? Wasn't she Jack Nicholson's lady friend? John Huston's daughter? Didn't she dabble in acting?
With her breakout performance in ''Prizzi's Honor'' in 1985, Anjelica Huston finally came into her own. True, John Huston directed, and Nicholson starred. And Kathleen Turner played the other lead. But in the supporting role of Maerose Prizzi, Anjelica Huston had a screen presence that was not a little startling. Maerose looked like a contessa and talked like a longshoreman, and she took the film beyond some sort of artistic sound barrier when she said to Nicholson's character: ''Come on, Chawley. You wanna do it? Let's do it right here on the Oriental.'' It was a moment of high humor, intense sexual voltage and blissfully coarse tenderness - all brought off with regal dignity. ''Anjelica was top-of-the-line in 'Prizzi,' '' Nicholson told me. ''Acting doesn't come any better than that. I've heard it from everybody, from Brando to . . . Chi Chi Rodriguez,'' he said, laughing.
Anjelica Huston's performance won an Oscar (alone among the cast), and, even in triumph, she deflected her glory: ''This means a lot to me since it comes from a role in which I was directed by my father. And I know it means a lot to him.''
What she didn't say was that her father had directed her once before, some 15 years earlier; the experience had nearly sundered them.
A year after the release of ''Prizzi,'' Huston directed his daughter once again, as she played Gretta Conroy in her older brother Tony Huston's adaptation of James Joyce's story ''The Dead.'' In August 1987, shortly after finishing ''The Dead,'' and in the midst of another Huston family venture - ''Mr. North,'' adapted by John Huston, Janet Roach and James Castigan from Thornton Wilder's story ''Theophilus North,'' and directed by Huston's other son, Anjelica's half-brother, Danny Huston - John Huston died.
''The Dead,'' which was a critical success, was his final directorial victory; it also consolidated Anjelica Huston's acting career. She invested Gretta, the Dublin housewife haunted by her past, with a quiet, glowing dignity that seemed to come from deep within and from another place and time. It was a beautiful, contained performance and a beautifully directed one, made all the more striking by contrast with Maerose Prizzi. It was also to be the last shared triumph for father and daughter. Could Anjelica Huston triumph alone?
This year has brought the actress three new projects: she played a frontier woman in the television miniseries ''Lonesome Dove,'' which was shown on CBS a week ago; she is portraying an obsessed airline stewardess in Woody Allen's as-yet-unnamed movie; and she will appear as the evil Miss Ernst in Nicolas Roeg's adaptation of Roald Dahl's story ''The Witches.''
Her work is in high demand, yet she isn't quite, as they say, bankable. She seems quite pleased with this state of affairs. John Huston, after all, had commercial and artistic highs and lows, but is remembered as a great artist.
Even in celebrity-jaded Manhattan, Anjelica Huston drew notice. Met museumgoers stared at her, not the paintings. Her father had a regal if raffish presence, something out of the old, prevideo world, and she has inherited something very like it. At 5 feet 9 1/2 inches, she's hard to miss. She is sometimes likened to, even confused with, Cher, but the two are utterly different women and different actresses, even if Loretta Castorini in ''Moonstruck'' seemed to make substantial, unfootnoted tonal reference to Maerose Prizzi.
Anjelica Huston's speaking voice is a surprise, gentle and Irish-tinted: the soft a in ''and,'' the long e in ''been.'' She is quiet and serious even when she smiles, wry when she's being serious. Seeing an elderly man in a wheelchair at the Met, she said: ''I brought my father here in his wheelchair near the end of his life. It wasn't any good, though. He made too much noise.'' In the next room, there was a large Degas oil of some women scrubbing down race horses. ''My father's idea of heaven,'' she said.
IF JOHN HUSTON WAS A LIVING LEGEND TO THE world, he was doubly monumental to his children. ''I remember being at a point below his knees, and looking up at the vast length of him,'' Anjelica Huston told me over lunch after we left the museum. She was wearing a chic hound's-tooth pantsuit and many gold bracelets on her wrists, and she spoke with quiet energy. ''He was 6-foot-3; his voice was big. He was devastatingly attractive - even to his daughter as a child. I remember watching him get dressed sometimes.
''He would ask me about his ties - rows of ties. I would pick out something, and he would never follow my advice. He had sort of a contempt for vanity, but he knew exactly the kind of impact that he had. He was the first man I ever saw in a black leather suit. He wore kimonos. When he came back from 'The Barbarian and the Geisha,' a movie he made in 1958, everything was Japanese. He would have sort of epochs.''
She lit a cigarette. ''And his voice was so beautiful, so enveloping. He was just bigger and better than anyone else.''
John Huston, son of the actor Walter Huston, directed 41 films, of which nearly a dozen will live on as classics. A brilliant, hard-drinking, womanizing charmer, he was a sardonic sentimentalist who married five times. He wed his fourth wife, a young ballerina named Enrica Soma, in 1949.
''My mother was beautiful,'' Anjelica Huston told me, ''the daughter of a New York restaurateur called Tony Soma, who had a famous restaurant called Tony's. That was where my father first met my mother. It was during the war. Grandfather would have her come down to meet the guests in the restaurant. At that point, she was just starting to dance with Balanchine; she had to write a three-page essay for her father every time she went to the ballet. My father told her he would take her to the ballet, and she wouldn't have to write an essay.
''He hired a hansom cab, and he got her a corsage. And the day before their date, he was called away on a secret intelligence mission, and never showed up.
''Years later, her portrait - a Halsman photograph -was on the cover of Life magazine, as a young ballerina. She was put under contract to Selznick, and brought out to California. And she was sitting at a dinner table, and my father was placed next to her. And he introduced himself, and said, 'We've never met.' And she said, 'Oh, but we have.' ''
''She married him when she was 20,'' Anjelica Huston said. ''And then immediately had my brother and me, so she didn't go on as a ballerina. Moved to Ireland.''
JOHN HUSTON HAD FALLEN IN LOVE WITH IRELAND when he visited it while preparing to film ''The African Queen,'' and soon after Anjelica was born he moved his young family there, to a manorial estate near Galway. He played the part of country gentleman - when he was home, not directing movies around the world.
''My mother must have felt pretty lost,'' Anjelica Huston recalled. ''Very isolated. And my brother and I were very much left to our own devices. We didn't have lots of friends. So we were constantly sort of creating our own pastimes. We had pigs and dogs; my brother was a falconer. And we had horses and cats.
''I wanted to act. I was one of those children who do commercials in front of the mirror. I loved to dress up - I was always getting married. I think between 6 and 7, I was married about 20 to 30 times. Two girlfriends and I did the three witches from 'Macbeth.' I forgot my lines, and burst into tears and spent the rest of the night buried in my mother's lap, weeping.
''My father didn't like weakness. He couldn't abide it in others; he certainly couldn't tolerate it in himself. He didn't tolerate whining and bad behavior from children. He liked what was adult in children. If you were heard, you had to be very careful that you knew your stuff.
''He had a cruel streak - made him interesting. He liked his fun. It was certainly sometimes at the expense of others. I think he was sometimes reckless, and at worst thoughtless, but I don't think he was ever a man of bad intent. I think that he regretted things later, after he'd had some time to consider. But I think that if there were a sin there, it was that he was very much preoccupied with what he wanted to do, which didn't necessarily coincide with his having a wife, or having children.''
When Anjelica was 10, her mother took the children and moved to London. It was a difficult period. Ricky Huston had a child by another man; John Huston had a child -Danny - by another woman. Nevertheless, for a long while, Anjelica couldn't admit to herself that her parents no longer loved each other. She missed the country, and she hated her new school. Her father remained a presence in her life -the children would return to his estate during holidays -but as she entered adolescence, in the swinging London of the mid-1960's, the relationship grew increasingly difficult.
''I was not doing very well in school,'' she told me. ''I was going to a lot of ban-the-bomb marches. He was hard-pressed to approve of me in those days.
''I was at Holland Park Comprehensive, and there was a school search going on for Juliet - Zeffirelli was trying to locate his Juliet. And they were interested in me, and I met with them twice or so. I was 15. Long hair, parted in the middle; a lot of black eye makeup. White, white skin. I didn't much like the way I looked then. Very tall, very skinny. And I wanted to be Juliet. My father wrote Zeffirelli's producer, saying please desist, that I wasn't going to be playing Juliet, I was going to be making a movie with him in Vienna.''
In his gruff and distant way, John Huston admired his daughter. He felt she had the makings of a fine actress, but believed he was the only one who could bring out her talent. He had a property in mind for her: a Hans Koningsberger novel, ''A Walk With Love and Death,'' about the doomed love of a student and a young noblewoman during the Hundred Years' War in France.
''I didn't like the part,'' Anjelica Huston said. ''I thought the woman was corny.'' His daughter's objections were no obstacle for John Huston. Anjelica made her film debut as the novel's Claudia, not as Juliet, and her father not only directed but co-starred, as her uncle, Robert the Elder.
The reaction to the film was less than ecstatic, and as its nepotistic centerpiece, Anjelica Huston took a lot of the heat. Roger Greenspun, in one of the kinder reviews, wrote in The New York Times that she was ''a plain, immensely appealing young woman who perhaps can't [ act ] .''
But bad notices were to be the least of her problems in 1969. Soon before ''A Walk With Love and Death'' was released, Ricky Huston was killed in a car crash in Strasbourg, France. ''My mother's death was a complete overhaul of the world as I knew it,'' Anjelica Huston told me. ''I was in no way prepared for her to die. My father was more than 20 years older than she, and it occurred to me often that he would die. He had emphysema already. My mother was going to live forever -she was 39 when she was killed. It was like losing my best friend, my mother and my sister all in one. Nothing has happened to me before or since to equal the impact of that shock.''
ANJELICA HAD BEEN understudying the role of Ophelia for Marianne Faithfull in a London production of ''Hamlet''; after her mother died, wanting to get as far away as possible, she went with the play to America. She also had to do a publicity tour for ''A Walk With Love and Death,'' and face the reviews. ''I was roundly criticized and made to feel very unattractive,'' she told me. ''And I took these things to heart. But I didn't know a way around that. I didn't have my mother to comfort me and tell me I was beautiful. That's what mothers are for at that age - to tell you you're great, give you confidence and tell you you can do whatever you want to do.'' Once the play's run was through, her acting career simply petered out.
John Huston had never paid much attention to money, living lavishly when he could afford it and when he couldn't. Anjelica Huston was brought up to enjoy luxury; but now that she was entering adulthood, on the outs with her father, she found she couldn't support herself. In 1971, Richard Avedon, an old friend of Ricky Huston's, asked Anjelica to model for a Vogue fashion shoot in Ireland. She agreed eagerly.
''I started to model,'' she said. ''It was lucrative, easy. I had a boyfriend, and it was kind of my object to stay away from the biz for a while.''
In 1972, Anjelica and her boyfriend went on a deep-sea fishing trip off Mexico with John Huston. Anjelica was eager for her father and her boyfriend to like each other, but they emphatically did not. The trip wound up a disaster. Anjelica and her boyfriend parted ways permanently at the airport. She drove to her father's house in Pacific Palisades and stayed for several months.
For the first time, she found herself able to relate to her father as an adult. When he went off to Morocco to direct ''The Man Who Would Be King'' later that year, she stayed on in his house. Then, in 1973, she met Jack Nicholson. ''What can I say?'' Nicholson said. ''I can't come up with words poetic enough to describe her. She has a very strong aura. She struck me as being stunning. Not pretty, but very beautiful in a powerful way. Deep class.'' Not long afterward, she moved in with him.
''At the moment I met Jack, I didn't want to work for a couple of years,'' Anjelica Huston said. ''I wanted to stay in California, and the possibility of modeling was just not there. I was high-fashion; I was unusual.'' Nicholson told me: ''I rather liked that she didn't want to work at first.'' ''It took some time for Anjelica to find herself,'' Tony Huston told me. ''This has been true of all the Hustons, going back to Walter.''
Anjelica may have stopped acting, but she hadn't entirely given up on the idea. Soon after meeting Nicholson, she was offered a chance to read for a part in a new movie, ''The Fortune.'' Mike Nichols, a friend of hers and Nicholson's, was to direct; Nicholson was to co-star, with Warren Beatty. ''I refused to read,'' Huston said. ''I didn't want handouts. I was a bit on my high horse about accepting stuff that I didn't feel I'd earned. Which is a thing you get out of pretty soon if you work in that town long enough. You should be happy for whatever you can get, if that's what you want to do.''
By the mid-70's, Huston couldn't get much of anything. She acted in children's television. Through a friend, Penny Marshall, she did a couple of guest shots on ''Laverne & Shirley.'' In one, she played a model with a toy Eiffel Tower on her head. Which, by then, she was glad to do. ''By the time Penny offered me those things on 'Laverne & Shirley,' '' she said, ''I was having trouble getting in to read for things.''
At the same time, in the wake of his Oscar-winning turn in ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,'' Nicholson's career was soaring.
''It was tough,'' Huston recalled. ''He was being sent 25 scripts a day, and I wasn't receiving any. It was as difficult for him, surely, in his position, as for me to say, 'Listen, you're getting all these scripts, you're getting all this attention; why aren't I getting scripts, why aren't I getting enough attention?' ''
''God forbid that Jack not be successful,'' she told me. ''I just saw him in 'Ironweed,' and it broke my heart. I hate to see him as a bum. I want Jack to be happy and rich and laughing at the rest of us. It's not that I don't want the best of what life has to offer to Jack, but when you want to be doing the same thing, and you're living with someone who's getting a tremendous amount of attention - it's difficult.''
''Like her father was, and like she is now,'' Nicholson said, ''you gotta be realistic about the film business. Getting calls at that point in your career is ridiculous. And I think that at that point Anjelica had an honestly unrealistic view of the situation.''
In 1980, she took a small role in another Nicholson vehicle, ''The Postman Always Rings Twice.'' As Madge, the severe, jodhpur-wearing lady lion-tamer who has a brief fling with Nicholson's character, Anjelica Huston looked fierce enough to tame big cats with a glance. ''Two kind of dominant factors emerge when models start to act,'' she said. ''One is, they're very preoccupied with their look. Or there's 'I'm not going to be one of those models who looks good all the time. I'm going to forget the camera; I'm going to ignore where my lighting's coming from, and work within character.' I hated the way I looked in 'Postman.' ''
In 1982, after a serious auto accident that evoked eerie memories of her mother's crash, Huston moved out of Nicholson's house in Beverly Hills and bought her own place nearby. The relationship continued, at a slight geographical remove. ''There was no room for him to go the way he was going and for me to create a career,'' she said. ''When you're with someone as gregarious as Jack, in a house like that, it's hard.'' Many people passed through Nicholson's big house on Mulholland Drive, including Roman Polanski, who directed Nicholson and John Huston in ''Chinatown'' in 1974. In 1977, Polanski was charged with committing statutory rape in Nicholson's house. ''I was present when the police came,'' Huston told me. ''It was not a legal entry.''
''I needed, at that point, to collect myself and get very methodical about things,'' she said. ''Divorce myself from the aura of his success, and learn what the boundary of my own success - if any -was.'' She continued to try to get work. While Huston was rehearsing for an American Film Institute movie of a Strindberg play, the director, Lee Grant, suggested she go to acting class. ''I think Lee became a little nervous, since the character hadn't progressed all that much, and we were in the second week,'' Huston said. ''I think she felt maybe I didn't have the experience. Which I was very hurt by at the time.''
Nicholson gave her the same advice. Huston swallowed her pride and went to class. The teacher was the late Peggy Feury. ''She was fantastic with me,'' Huston said. ''Where I was insecure, she reinforced me. She was tremendously approving. And it was all I needed at that point. Because I was so terribly vulnerable. There was a lot in her that I recognized from my mother. Also, she was Irish-American. She was a lot like going home. Sometimes when other people were working in the class, she'd just cast a look my way. So I felt in complicity with her.
''One of the fun things about class - and I still do it - is in rehearsal, or whenever I'm confronted with something that gives me trouble, I get as loud and rambunctious and as stupid as I can possibly get with it. Once you're past the barrier of 'Oh, I look stupid,' it's like skiing - unless you fall in the snow on your face, you're not going to be able to get up and be any good.''
In the opinion of the director Nicolas Roeg, ''Anjelica's work is so good because she's able to abandon herself and come out unscathed.''
The producer John Foreman had worked on several projects with John Huston, including ''The Man Who Would Be King.'' He first met Anjelica when she accompanied Nicholson to a reading, but didn't get to know her until her father was hospitalized for emphysema. ''It was in Los Angeles, in the late 70's, and John was having a desperate time,'' Foreman recalled. ''People sat with him around the clock, in watches. That was when I first came to appreciate Anjelica. Her bearing was unique, her grandeur, her humor. I became aware that she was no longer interested in modeling, and that she was trying to act. I also saw that she had Jack's total admiration.''
Foreman produced a special-effects comedy for MGM/UA in the early 1980's, a space shoot-em-up called ''Ice Pirates.'' ''We needed someone to play the part of an Amazon, with guns and swords on her hips,'' Foreman said. ''And since Anjelica had the longest neck in the world, and the handsomest figure, I asked her to test. When she stepped in front of the camera, I got chills down my spine.'' ''Ice Pirates'' was a harmless romp that would do nothing at the box office, but Anjelica Huston got to swagger and tough-talk her way through the movie, having fun and gaining confidence. ''It was the best break I'd had,'' she said.
Shortly after the shooting of ''Ice Pirates,'' John Huston invited Foreman to his apartment and handed him a book. ''Here, kid. Read this,'' Huston said. The book was Richard Condon's ''Prizzi's Honor.'' Huston did not explicitly suggest that he direct the film himself - he was, after all, almost 80 years old and in poor health - but Foreman got the idea. Foreman took the book to Anjelica and said, ''How would you like to play Maerose?''
She loved the book, and instantly said yes. ''What do you think of Jack as Charley and your father to direct?'' Foreman asked. ''I was made to feel instrumental in getting it done,'' Anjelica Huston said. ''It wasn't a feeling of being pulled in because I had connections, but more engendering my support so that we could get Dad and Jack together.'' The equal footing brought father and daughter closer together than ever before.
''One of the things that impresses me now about Dad was that he knew exactly when to give us a leg up,'' Tony Huston told me. ''It was at the end of his life that family and family tradition became important. It just might not have taken if he'd helped us earlier.
''Dad was able to bring out Anjel's soft side in a way that no other director has. I think she's done her best work with my father.'' ''I think 'Prizzi's Honor' effected a reconciliation that lasted the rest of John's life,'' John Foreman said. ''He finally felt securely that she was a self-sufficient actor.'' ''The main thing to know about Anjelica,'' Nicholson said, ''is that there's a certain level of sophistication among modern young women in acting where, frankly, she simply owns the category. There's nobody else that comes near her. And she just gets better. She continues to grow, which is all you can ask of any spectacular person.''
ANJELICA HUSTON stood at the breakfast buffet at the New York Friars Club, loading her plate with corned beef hash, bacon, home fries and sausage. It seemed entirely characteristic of her that she would have a hearty appetite.
Huston recently became one of the Friars' first female members, along with Liza Minnelli, Joan Rivers and Brooke Shields. She relishes the honor. ''Henny Youngman came over last time I was here,'' she said. ''He's the Squire, and he has to insult you. He said, 'Congratulations on your Oscar - beginner's luck.' ''
After the meal, she lit a cigarette and talked about the one thing no one ever fails to ask her about - her relationship with Jack Nicholson. The two live just minutes apart, in the hills, and are often seen together. As Huston and I spoke, she was about to fly to England, where Nicholson was working on the film ''Batman,'' to spend Christmas and New Year's with him. Will they ever marry? She doesn't care to say.
''It's a real relationship,'' she did say, ''maybe not so far as a traditional idea of one is concerned, but it's extremely powerful. It changes - it's always changed. If you're dealing with two volatile people, you go through many changes a day.
''The relationship is a fact of my life. After a certain time, you don't question those things. Whatever it is Jack wants to do, and whatever it is I want to do, we seem to accommodate each other. He's a soulmate. It goes beyond commitment. It's not as if one has any choice in the matter. ''Jack's true-blue. He doesn't disappoint - he doesn't have it in him. I hate to think of a world without Jack. It would be dismal.''
DOES SHE SEE HER-self as a character actress or a leading lady? ''I don't think about that. I think about parts that interest me. It doesn't really matter how big a part is, if it's got juice. I'd much prefer to be on the screen for 5 or 10 impactful moments'' - as in the 1988 British film ''A Handful of Dust,'' in which she played a sexy aviatrix -''than to meander through a landscape in an epic fashion.
''I like ensemble acting -it's bolstering. I'm more intrigued with playing characters than with playing people closer to myself.'' In the spring, she'll start on a new Paul Mazursky film, ''Enemies,'' based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer story.
John Huston was once asked what he most wanted out of life: love? security? fame? ''Interest, interest,'' he said. Anjelica Huston seems to feel the same way.
She smiled. ''When we were in Brooklyn filming 'Prizzi's Honor,' we walked into a restaurant,'' she recalled, ''and this old man saw my father and said, 'Oh, there's Walter's son.' Well, I think Americans particularly, who don't have all that much history, are very pleased to have whatever history they have. And I think my family's name is strong in the theater and strong in movie history, and I think people like that. It makes me feel good. I feel very much backed by my ancestors.''
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