Anjelica Huston

Biography

An Oscar-winning actress, producer and director who has starred in films such as The Grifters, The Witches, The Addams Family and The French Dispatch.

Huston is the daughter of director and actor John Huston and prima ballerina and model Enrica Soma. Huston’s paternal grandfather was Canadian-born actor Walter Huston. Huston has Scottish, Scotch-Irish, English and Welsh ancestry from her father, and Italian from her mother.

Huston has a complex family because of her parents’ multiple marriages. 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.

In the late 1960s, Huston began taking a few small roles in movies directed by her father. She began other small roles too; her hands were substituted for Deborah Kerr’s in the British Casino Royale. In 1969 she starred in A Walk with Love and Death, where she played the sixteen-year-old French noblewoman Claudia opposite Assi Dayan. 

Huston had been in the running to play Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, but her father decided to cast her in A Walk with Love and Death. She had been reluctant to perform in that. On set she clashed with her father, and critics derided her performance.

That year, her mother died in a car accident, at the age of thirty-nine. The young Huston relocated to the United States, where she modeled for several years. While modeling, she worked with photographers such as Richard Avedon and Bob Richardson. In the early 1970s, Huston, with Pat Cleveland, Pat Ast, Elsa Peretti, Karen Bjornson, Alva Chinn, and others, became one of fashion designer Halston’s favored troupe of models, nicknamed the Halstonettes.