Anjelica Huston (/ˈhjuːstən/ ⓘ HEW-stən; born July 8, 1951) is an American actress and director. Known for often portraying eccentric and distinctive characters, she has received multiple accolades, including an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, as well as nominations for three British Academy Film Awards and six Primetime Emmy Awards. In 2010, she was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The daughter of director John Huston and granddaughter of actor Walter Huston, she reluctantly made her big screen debut in her father's A Walk with Love and Death (1969). Huston moved from London to New York City, where she worked as a model throughout the 1970s. She decided to actively pursue acting in the early 1980s, and subsequently, had her breakthrough with her performance as a mobster moll in Prizzi's Honor (1985), also directed by her father, for which she became the third generation of her family to receive an Academy Award, when she won Best Supporting Actress, joining both John and Walter Huston in this recognition. She achieved further critical and popular recognition for playing a mistress in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), a long-vanished wife in Enemies, A Love Story (1989), a con artist in The Grifters (1990), the Grand High Witch in The Witches (1990), Morticia Addams in the Addams Family films (1991–93), and an adventurous writer in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993).
Huston directed the films Bastard Out of Carolina (1996) and Agnes Browne (1999); collaborated with director Wes Anderson in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), and The Darjeeling Limited (2007); and lent her voice to several animated films, mainly the Tinker Bell franchise (2008–2015). Her other films include The Crossing Guard (1995), Ever After (1998), Choke (2008), 50/50 (2011) and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019). She has also acted in the miniseries Family Pictures (1993), Buffalo Girls (1995), and The Mists of Avalon (2001), as well as the series Huff (2006), Medium (2008–2009), and Transparent (2015–2016). She won a Golden Globe for playing Carrie Chapman Catt in the cable film Iron Jawed Angels (2004), and a Gracie Award for her portrayal of Eileen Rand in Smash (2012–2013). She has written the memoirs A Story Lately Told (2013) and Watch Me (2014).
Early life
Huston was born at 6:29 P.M. on July 8, 1951, at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, in Los Angeles, to director and actor John Huston and prima ballerina and model Enrica Soma. According to Huston, "the news of my arrival was cabled promptly to the post office in the township of Butiaba, in Western Uganda days later, a barefoot runner bearing a telegram finally arrived at Murchison Falls", where her father was filming The African Queen (1951). Huston's paternal grandfather was Canadian-born actor Walter Huston. Huston has Scottish, Irish, English and Welsh ancestry from her father, and Italian from her mother.
When Huston was 2 years old, her family relocated to Ireland, where she spent much of her childhood and which she still considers home. Her parents rented what Huston called the "Courtown House" —a tall stone Victorian manor in County Kildare— for three years, before John Huston bought St. Clerans, a 110-acre estate in County Galway, in 1954. She attended school at Kylemore Abbey, and later attended Holland Park School after relocating to England.
Huston has a complex family because of her parents' multiple marriages and extramarital affairs. She has an older brother, Tony, and an adopted older brother, Pablo. She has a younger maternal half-sister named Allegra, whom she called "Legs", and a younger paternal half-brother, actor Danny Huston. She is the aunt of actor Jack Huston. She once described herself as a "lonely child", explaining: "My brother Tony and I were never very close, neither as children nor as adults, but I was tightly bound to him. We were forced to be together because we were really quite alone. We were in the middle of the Irish countryside ... and we didn't see many other kids. We were tutored. Our father was mostly away ".
