She was the third generation of her family to win an Oscar. So how has Anjelica Huston coped with being Hollywood royalty? She talks to Hugh Linehan
Nineteen fifty-two. A London maternity ward. Ricki Soma, a beautiful 19-year-old dancer and model, gives birth to a baby girl. The news is telegraphed to the Belgian Congo, then passed to a runner, who bears it for three days through the jungle to the place where John Huston is directing Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. The director reads the note, then places it without comment in his pocket, looking up to find Hepburn staring at him with exasperation. "John," she cries. "For heaven's sake, what is it?"
The story of Anjelica Huston's birth would not be out of place in her new film, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Wes Anderson's picaresque adventure comedy stars Bill Murray as an ageing Jacques Cousteau-ish undersea explorer who sails the oceans with his Campari-swilling, reefer-smoking crew, in search of aquatic exotica, while teetering perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy. Huston plays Eleanor Zissou, Murray's serene, unflappable and independently wealthy wife, who observes her husband's disastrous shenanigans from the safe distance of her villa, her needs attended to by a well-oiled toy boy.
The sort of magnificent eccentricity that Anderson affectionately portrays in the film might, I surmise, bear some resemblance to Huston's own family history, growing up in an east Galway big house, where her father had set himself up as a local grandee. After all, it was during this period that John Huston made Moby Dick. Sitting in a London hotel suite, Huston, the nearest Hollywood comes to hereditary royalty as the third generation of Oscar-winners in her family, after John and her grandfather Walter, agrees that there are some similarities. "I've heard the film described as 'offbeat' and that terrible word 'quirky'. But I think 'eccentricity' is the nicest way that I've heard it described. And, yes, I guess personal history informs everything you do to a certain extent. There are elements of this character that would correlate with my father. They are intrepid. They have an iconoclastic view of the world. They don't suffer fools. They will do what they intend to do, come hell or high water, no matter who's sacrificed along the way. These are qualities which can sometimes be difficult for those who are interacting with them, but you have to stand back and admire them. These are the men who really paint the big picture."
The international bohemian jet set of the mid-20th century (Anderson's film, although notionally set in the present, harks back to the 1950s and 1960s) played by a different set of rules from us wage slaves. Rampant infidelity, conspicuous consumption, potential bankruptcy and uncertain paternity were the stuff of everyday life. "Yes," says Huston. "And actually become rather glamorous in the eye of the beholder. That's one of the beauties of Wes's take on these kinds of men. They're extravagant romantics, and I think women who might want a safe man feel a bit betrayed by this kind of character, but on the other hand there's a magnificence and a freedom to it, and daring and courage and all those things, that you have to stand back and admire in the long run, and try not to take personally."
Those first 10 years in Ireland have left their mark. "I'd say I feel a closer connection with Ireland than anywhere. I know it has changed a lot, although I haven't been to the west in 10 years." Her most recent extended stay was five years ago, for the filming of Agnes Browne, the rather misguided comedy she starred in and directed.
"We didn't spend a lot of time in Dublin when I was a child. We'd go up to see the doctor and the dentist, then go back down on the train to Athenry. So I remember Grafton Street and O'Connell Street and Trinity College. Grafton Street alone has changed enormously, as a microcosm of everything else. I'd say the changes are both good and bad. When I was growing up, Ireland was a poor country, and now it's one of the richest in Europe. As far as I can see it hasn't changed people's character. I think it would be a pity if Ireland became too generic, but you can't hold back the hands of time. And memory is a funny thing. There are houses you go into that you grew up in - all of a sudden the rooms are smaller, everything's different."
There's been much talk of John Huston's life in Galway, riding to hounds, inviting glamorous guests such as Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift to stay. But he must have been away from his family most of the time. "Yes, but he was always there, even if not in body, in spirit. The house in Ireland resonated with him at every turn."
She wants to come back to make another film here. "I'm dying to. I have one in my head, but you know how it is when you talk about them; you might as well cross them off immediately. But I do have one up my sleeve. I haven't been to Ireland much since Agnes Browne. I'm still very much in touch, though, because we have the John Huston Film School, in Galway, who have just given me a doctorate. My schoolmates would be rolling their eyes at that. Even if you come by it this way, it still feels pretty good."
When her parents separated, in 1962, she moved with her mother to London, where, it is said, she threw herself as a precocious adolescent into the Sixties scene, although she doesn't remember it that way. "There is that notion that Swinging London was all about fun," she says. "But I was talking about that with my girlfriends the other day, because I still have a lot of friends from the early days who I went to school with. We were examining whether or not it was really fun, and we decided that, yes, there was a lot going on, a lot of which we were just a little bit too young for. There were a lot of firsts - seeing the Rolling Stones or Jimi Hendrix, or Maria Callas, or plays directed by Franco Zeffirelli - which were extraordinary, especially for someone just out of Ireland, having a life revealed which one had no idea of before.
"Adolescence is filled with all sorts of angst and insecurity. There were fun moments, but most of it was about insecurity, about being at an age where criticism is the most hideous thing which could happen to you. And of course there was the death of my mother, which I would say was the most horrible thing to happen in my life. So there was a lot of no fun, too." She was told of her mother's death, in a car crash in Geneva in 1969, while playing the lead in her father's film A Walk With Love And Death, which turned out to be a disastrous flop. She was 17. (There's a treatise to be written sometime on nepotism as cruelty when powerful film-makers cast their vulnerable teenage offspring in their movies.) She fled to the US, where a new career beckoned.
"I'd understudied Marianne Faithful in Tony Richardson's Hamlet at the Roundhouse, and I really liked it," she says. "When my mother died I knew I couldn't stay in London any more. I was too sad. Her spirit had gone from the house, and the place was empty and hollow. I went to America with the play and was sent on a few assignments for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. [The late photographer] Dick Avedon was a friend of both my parents, but in particular of my mother's. We did a big trip for Vogue together, and Diana Vreeland [the magazine's late editor-in-chief] was always very good to me. So that's how that started up, and through working with good people I became better at what I did. I learned about lighting and make-up and clothes. I learned a lot from those people, and through some stroke of luck, maybe because I was what they call a celebrity model as opposed to a girl who just came up with no name to support her, maybe a bit more attention was paid to me.
"So a lot of that was to my advantage, but I also fought it, because I didn't want any favours - not realising that the world is built on favours. But it worked pretty well for me, even though I wasn't necessarily very conventional-looking."
She graced the covers of some of the world's best-known fashion magazines but was still, she confesses, deeply insecure about her looks. "I remember when I was modelling, looking in the mirror and thinking: 'Why me?' Particularly when I looked to right and left and saw these beautiful girls around me. I remember getting very depressed about the way I looked. So there was something else going on. Something about maybe proving it wasn't as bad as I thought it was, proving I could get through something that was causing me discomfort about the way I looked. I don't know; maybe it was just sheer unbridled ambition," she laughs. Or maybe a determination not to be written off as just another cossetted child of the rich and famous. "I don't lie down easily, and I've found in my life that sometimes the negatives worked more strongly than the positives; i.e. someone says to me, 'Oh, you'll never do this or that.' Yeah, well, watch me . . . Sometimes that's had a very good effect on me."
The modelling success, she says, brought her round to a place where she felt able to go to acting class. "And to work through some of my paranoia about why I should get something rather than someone else, my feelings of inadequacy.
Why paranoia? "There's a certain amount of paranoia in thinking that you're only getting gigs because of who you are and not because of what you are. I never felt particularly ravishing, although there were moments when I felt confident."
It was during this time that she hooked up with Jack Nicholson, with whom she was to be in a relationship for 17 years - albeit with extra-curricular dalliances by both parties. She'd been trying to have a child for some time when Nicholson announced his impending fatherhood with another woman. That was the end of that, although they still talk occasionally. She has been married for 10 years to the sculptor Robert Graham.
Does she regret not having children? "I simply feel it wasn't meant to be. I made my efforts, but I can't say that I do regret it. I have fantastic nieces and nephews, and a whole new generation of them now, and I enjoy as good a relationship with them as I do with anyone. I'm crazy about them; they love me back; it's all good. Maybe that wasn't the life to which I was ultimately suited, although I do have a husband and a conventional home life. Well, semi-conventional. But I have to say I do like the freedom of going on location, of travelling to places I haven't been, the extreme closeness of working on a film. Maybe, even probably, it stems from my father. It's a bit of a vagabond life, but it's the life I've always loved."
It might have been the shadow of Nicholson, as well as the older one of her father, but it took a long time before she really made her mark as an actress, working, ironically, with both of them on Prizzi's Honor, for which she won an Oscar. Since then she has played an impressively wide range of roles, from John Cusack's formidable mother in The Grifters to the elegant Gothic campery of Morticia Addams; Gretta Conroy in The Dead, her father's swansong; and the obsessive spurned lover in Woody Allen's Crimes And Misdemeanors. "I see some of myself in all the parts I play," she says. "I can't play a part for which I don't have sympathy, even if they're witches. When I came to play witches I realised I've always had a connection with them, which is what makes them uniquely horrible. It's that they're in hell. Witches are deeply uncomfortable. They look in the mirror; they hate what they see. They have a very hard time. I find female roles that just serve as an adjunct to the male are a little bit boring. I like character roles, because they're the ones that are beautifully written, and generally if they're beautifully written you get character and insight and excitement."
She'll be seen later this year alongside John Malkovich and Jim Broadbent in Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential, and she has just won a Golden Globe for her performance in the TV movie Iron Jawed Angels. But directing, she says, is interesting her more and more. "I've just directed my third movie, Riding The Bus With My Sister. It stars Rosie O'Donnell, who I actually wanted to star in Agnes Browne. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to do it at the last moment, and I had to fill in. I had a very good experience on the first film I directed, Bastard Out Of Carolina, and hopefully I'll be able to go on and make more films with more confidence."
One wonders whether in this, as in other areas of her life, she is working through the implications of her own lineage. "I don't know," she says. "It didn't occur to me until just before I set out to make my first film. Maybe it was a confidence thing, maybe it was because he cast a very long shadow, maybe it was just because it came along at the right time. Or an amalgam of all those things. I'm going through the same process with it that I did when I was beginning to act, which was that I put my foot in the water a bit. I've got to learn as I go along. It keeps me interested, keeps me alive. It's good for my soul."
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is on general release