Tall, dark and Huston

Her famous lover and dominant father cast heavy shadows. Her husband is gone. Anjelica Huston talks about love and death and being back in the light

Chrissy Iley

Sunday June 26 2011, 1.01am BST, The Sunday Times

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We meet at Shutters on the Beach hotel in Santa Monica, LA. We order lobster salad and — unheard of at lunchtime in California — white wine, but then Anjelica Huston has never accepted convention. She has always been attracted to the dark side, the gothic, most at home playing Morticia in The Addams Family, or a witch, or a mafia bad girl in Prizzi’s Honor, for which she won her Oscar in 1986. More recently, Wes Anderson has reinvented her in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Royal Tenenbaums, where she plays both imperious and broken.

She is known for having an alpha presence, yet men have cast heavy shadows: her father, the macho director John Huston, for whom the term hellraiser seems too weak a cliché, and Jack Nicholson, larger-than-life womaniser straight out of the same mould. She has always had a dangerous, edgy vibe. Her face has been called imposing, corvine. She herself joked it was the kind of face only seen on old coins.

Today the face is the same, only the eyes look a little surrendered. Her hair is still striking, lustrous, her mouth still looks like it was drawn on. Intense brown eyes that are not afraid to gaze right through you. Her voice is deep and crackly like the purr of a cat that’s been drinking Bourbon and smoking cigarettes.

She is well put together: blue palazzo pants, black patent- leather, Tory Burch mules, a soft white T-shirt with net inserts that reveal pale flesh — although perhaps not as vampiric as it once was. She smells exotic, of the scent she’s always worn, Mille by Jean Patou.

But there’s something new since we last met: a profound sadness. Two and a half years ago her husband of 16 years, Robert Graham, the sculptor, died after a long illness. It has been an extremely gruelling time, losing the man she loved most. She talks about death with a disconcerting familiarity. Ostensibly we are here to talk about Horrid Henry, a rather sweet 3-D children’s movie where she plays the cruel teacher. But she tells me about the year she spent hoping her husband was not going to die, and how it’s taken her a while to accept “widowhood”. The word “widow” comes with shiver- inducing pathos.

Jack Nicholson, her long-time love, confessed when they broke up that he was 'emotionally annihilated' by the couple's separation Jack Nicholson, her long-time love, said when they broke up that he was “emotionally annihilated” by the separation. “I may have made a mistake,” he confessed, “but I don’t want to go back and correct it. I would rather deal with it.”

She says: “You can’t go back in time but you can move forward. I talk to Jack. I don’t speak on a day-to-day basis but we keep in touch. It’s a nice relationship, mature.”

Quite nice that you were able to annihilate. “Well, particularly if they deserve to be annihilated.” A small smile. She is dismissive of that passion, the intense uncertainty of their relationship, in which infidelity didn’t necessarily mean betrayal, but there should have been a deeper loyalty.

She had an on-o relationship with Ryan O’Neal, and other encounters, during her 16-year liaison with Nicholson. It wasn’t until Nicholson got Rebecca Broussard pregnant that there was no turning back.

Huston had been trying for a baby. She remembers the photos in the lifestyle magazines, of Nicholson and girlfriend and baby.

It was all too public.

But it was Graham who was the love of her life. She talks about how hard it was when he was sick. How she couldn’t think straight or do anything except look after him. “It was impossible

for me to work. Oddly, nothing came to me at that time. I had very few offers. Perhaps people knew what was going on. Perhaps it was just luck that I had enough time to devote myself entirely.” She has just made a “cancer comedy”, 50/50. Wasn’t that tough after being so close to serious illness?

“My life has always reflected my work. I don’t know if that’s just what I’m sympathetic to or it’s fate.”

She grew up in Galway, in a big rambling house called St Clerans Manor House. Her father loved Ireland. He loved hunting. He loved the freedom. He hated McCarthyism, control. She too has adopted Ireland. It’s in her heart. She was very moved by the Queen’s recent visit. “How fabulous was the Queen’s speech?” she says with pride. Her father got rid of the house after her mother died, because his new wife didn’t like it — this also causes an ache.

“I’ve been back a couple of times since Bob died. It was a hotel. It was a very strange experience, like being Alice down a rabbit hole. Everything displaced, every door I opened went into a room or bathroom and some of it not so beautiful. You want to see the place functioning and the fire burning.” Perhaps she should buy it?

“Ha. Those places cost so much to keep. If there were any rich Irishmen who wanted to marry me, that could go together quite easily. Even if they were gay that could possibly be arranged.”

She wears a pointy prosthetic nose and chin in Horrid Henry, to play Miss Battle-Axe. “When I saw her she had purple hair and a pointy nose, so I asked for prosthetics and the director said, ‘No, no, nobody’s going to be using prosthetics.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know how to go about this part unless you let me have a little pointy nose and a little pointy chin.’ They didn’t stick on very well, but I thought it was integral to her character that she be pointy. I got fixated on this one nature programme on the BBC where a couple set a trap in the shore lands of Cornwall and they caught a common shrew, and he had a long nose, a plaintive look but a hateful, shrewish face, so I thought, ‘I’ve found my template.’”

Was she worried about looking a fright? “No, I knew what I was letting myself in for. It’s a kids’ movie. You’re not looking for subtlety. And I have less and less vanity. That’s not to say if I see a horrible picture of myself I won’t cringe.”

She turns 60 this week and says she once tried Botox; her husband got upset when he told her a sad story and she couldn’t react to it facially. She laughs. “One of the oddest things about my present moment is that there is nobody in my life to tell me what I shouldn’t do, so I find myself relying on what people have told me in the past. I don’t know if I should rush out and do all the things that were forbidden. I looked very tired after that year and a half [of caring for Robert]. I don’t know that a little lifting, a little Botox, is such a horrible idea this year. I don’t feel adamant about it any more.”

Is there another man in her life? She shakes her head, looking more relaxed, less savaged by grief. She perks up. “It’s strange, I’ve never had a period in my life since I was 15 when I didn’t have a boyfriend or several. It’s taking some getting used to.

"There are some moments when, yes, I have been lonely. You come home after a night out and you go, ‘What’s missing?’

There’s nobody to talk to. So you certainly feel that emptiness, but at the same time I don’t feel compelled to fill that space.”

Maybe it’s too early? “Maybe. I don’t think I’m putting out the signals. I don’t care really. I’m still living in a house I shared with my husband. Venice [Beach] is where I moved for Bob.

Venice has been good for me, character building. If it hadn’t been for Venice I’d be behind some gate on Mulholland Drive.

I’d be a recluse and afraid of mixing with the public. Venice takes the starch out of you. There’s a very immediate sense of living, down here.”

She had always been attracted to bad boys and risk. All of that shifted when she married Graham. She was 41 and felt “as you go through life people reflect what you need. Great love affairs don’t necessarily make great marriages or even great friendship. Robert was kind to me. I’d finally met someone who told me what they were going to do and did it. He was single-minded in his pursuit of me and a genius in his own right”.

Always, before Robert, she had been the pursuer. “Not a happy place,” she shudders. Last time I met Anjelica we ended up crying. She had said that losing Nicholson was “like experiencing a death in the family. It was terrible loneliness and abandonment. He was my family”.

Now she has lost her actual family, her husband.

She’s very aware that her father was the first imprint, a vibrant character who was cruel to actors when he directed them, to test them, and sparing with his praise. With Graham the love was just there. Does she feel his presence?

“I had one thing happen shortly after he died. I have a shrine to him and I asked him a question and it was answered immediately in a way I can’t be specific about. I have a sense of him everywhere. That he could just walk through the door and I won’t be particularly surprised. And then there’s the knowledge that he’s not going to.

“I’ve been following a Mexican poet whose son was killed by the cartels. He said the e ect of the death is so profound that he’s never going to write poetry again. He talks about God and the afterlife and the questions that only get answered when we die.”

Is she religious? “Sometimes. I’m mostly pragmatic. I search less because I know the answer is more remote. If you chase something it runs away more. If you chase a horse you never catch it. In terms of spirituality, what you put out there is what you attract. The object is to get yourself to a place where you can be receptive, where you can be kind, where you don’t have to be defensive, where you can be at ease in your own skin.”

We share a salted caramel chocolate tart. “If you’re going to have dessert why go for the fruit?” She tells me she’s o to New York to film her new TV series about Broadway, Smash. “A sweet thing. It’s very well written. I’ll put my dogs in cages and just go with them. I wish I could do the same with my horses.”

Since she has wanted to fill space, she’s had lots of offers of parts.

“If your life always works that way, it doesn’t seem weird. The question is, do you choose the work or does it choose you? Sometimes we attract things that are darker. Sometimes we chase rainbows. So many girls go after guys because they think it’s going to transform them. It doesn’t make life easier. Perhaps it just makes you be able to feel.”

Did she do that? “Absolutely. As soon as I got all I wanted, I was like, is that all there is?” The behaviour of others around her in the face of her loss has sometimes been disillusioning. “Another very strange thing that happened in widowhood,” she confesses, “which I never expected, is that people can react very negatively to you and be very nasty. That somehow you haven’t done enough. Or they’re owed something. You think people are going to be comforting and empathic, but they’re f***ing greedy. So you get a nice dose of human nature and it can take the Sturm und Drang out of you. Whatever can get you through this, even if it’s anger, it will get you through. The pain is something that gnaws away at you and it’s like an affection. At least with anger you can get it out. So finding myself in a position where I had to be self-protective was good.”

She takes a forkful of the tart. “People don’t want you to be needy. They want you as strong as an ox. Eventually you get a little hardened. It’s not an easy time for women right now. Men have never been more shrill or more feminine.”

Not that a dearth of eligible men much concerns her. “When you undergo the loss of a mate, sex is the least of it. It seems trivial. I look at men and think, how old are you? What kind of man would want a woman my age? Would it be a man with salt- and-pepper hair and a pinstripe suit? Who would it be? Would it be some sort of artistic type who would want to have a shag on the beach? Would it be Rupert Murdoch or Warren Beaty or Donald Trump?

It’s not an easy time for women at the moment. Men have never been more shrill or more feminine

"Is there a template for the perfect man now? I suppose Jack was a universal template.”

We discuss the possibility that every woman’s template is perhaps based on some kind of father figure. Her father was a womanizer who lived in the pursuit of passion in that moment.

He never thought of consequences. No surprise, then, that Nicholson and her father loved each other. “I read another book about my father. Every time I read about him he’s making love to more women. This man has a more active love life than I do, and he’s been dead 20 years. And then I read about my poor mother waiting around for him and tolerating his stu . That’s not something I’d be tempted to do now.”

Has she ever done it? “I think I was doomed to replicate that kind of thing. But now, no. My type was, he’s out the door, he must be good. A gorgeous, deep-voiced flatterer. The bad dad. I understand now, you don’t have to jump into anything. There’s a certain period of widowhood grace. I completely understand the way you would wear black clothing for a few years, to keep you away from the world. And that’s not unhealthy. You need it.

When you’ve been ministering to someone who’s incredibly sick, trying to be everything to their nothing, you pour so much of yourself out, you are vulnerable, you are shaky after that. You need a period to rebuild.”

In her relationship with Graham she never felt dominated. She was able to be her own person and be with someone else. She wouldn’t know how to do a relationship as one half of a couple.

“My relationships haven’t lasted as long as myself, so as a single entity I’m going to own it. Going to New York scares me, but I’m going with it. Where I’m going to be, who I’m going to be with, who I’m not going to be with — I don’t even have a child to make those decisions around. It’s all about me now.”

She talks about her horses. “They are extremely intuitive. They can tell by the feel of you if you are tentative on their back.” She has a big piebald mare given to her by her father’s fifth and last wife, Celeste Shane. “I got on top of her and within seconds I was sailing back to the ground on a cloud of dust. I looked at her immense buttocks. She was an incredible animal and I was like a spider scurrying away from her, and then I thought, ‘I really don’t need to kill myself this way.’ I used to take risks all the time but now I don’t stand up on the back of motorbikes going 80mph on an Italian autostrada. I was a daredevil. I always took emotional risks, I always put myself in at the deep end.”

Has she stopped? “I’d think twice before I took big risks now,” she admits. Does she regret any of those risks? “Not at all. Some were fun and some a bit hurtful. I got over it a lot of love poems later.” Where are they now? “Thrown away or in the trash.” Now and again you get a glimpse of a naughty look, a sense of adventure.

She’ll work out a new ride.