Actor / Director Profile

Anjelica Huston was born on July 8, 1951, to director and actor John Huston and Italian American (from New York) prima ballerina Enrica (Ricki) Soma. Huston spent most of her childhood overseas, in Ireland and England, and in the late 1960s first dipped her toe into the acting profession, with a few small roles and one starring role in films directed by her father. However, in 1969 her mother died in a car accident, at 39, and Huston relocated to the United States, where the very tall, exotically beautiful young woman modeled for several years.After her modeling career ended, she decided to get back into movies in the early 1980s, studied acting and began to get roles. The first notable part came in 1985, when her father cast her as calculating, imperious Maerose, the daughter of a Mafia don whose love is scorned by a hit man (Jack Nicholson, who was Huston's boyfriend at the time) in the adaptation of Richard Condon's Mafia-satire novel Prizzi's Honor (1985). Huston won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance, making her the first person in Academy Award history to win an Oscar when a parent and a grandparent (her father and grandfather Walter Huston) had also won one.Huston thereafter worked prolifically, notable roles including co-star billing in Francis Ford Coppola's Gardens of Stone (1987), Barry Sonnenfeld's film versions of the Charles Addams cartoons The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993), in which she portrayed Addams matriarch Morticia, Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). Probably her finest performance on-screen, however, was as Lilly, the veteran, iron-willed con artist in Stephen Frears' The Grifters (1990), for which she received another Oscar nomination, this time for Best Actress. A sentimental favorite is her performance as the lead in her father's final film, an adaptation of James Joyce's The Dead (1987) -- with her many years of residence in Ireland, Huston's Irish accent in the film is authentic.Endowed with her father's great height and personal boldness, and her mother's beauty and aristocratic nose, Huston certainly cuts an imposing figure, and brings great confidence and authority to her performances. She clearly takes her craft seriously and has come into her own as a strong actress, emerging from under the shadow of her father, who passed away in 1987. Huston married sculptor Robert Graham in 1992, and the couple live in the Los Angeles area.