Anjelica Huston
She was born during The African Queen, met Captain Ahab on the set of Moby Dick and nearly 'out-Irished the Irish' while starring in The Dead. Anjelica Huston looks back on a life in movies and her relationship with her father, John.
* guardian.co.uk,
* Monday December 11 2006
Adrian Wootton: It's wonderful to welcome you here to the National Theatre. In a minute, I'll be asking you about The Dead, which we've all just seen. But before that, I'd like to ask you a bit about your father, John Huston, and rewind to the very beginning. You grew up in Ireland and I've read interviews where you talk about your early memories of Ireland and your very early memories of going on to your father's sets, on things like Heaven Knows, Mr Allison. Can you talk a little bit about that, about growing up in what I imagine to be quite a bohemian environment, and your first memories of knowing your father as a film-maker?
Anjelica Huston: I was born during The African Queen and my father was making Moulin Rouge when he was invited to Ireland on a fox-hunting holiday. He went over to Kildare and fell in love with the whole thing and decided that was where he wanted to raise his children. It was sort of in the immediate aftermath of the witch-hunts and he'd stood on the Committee for the First Amendment, and that had been a heartbreaking ordeal for everyone involved. I think it was important to him at that point to forge a life for himself outside the confines of Hollywood and also to provide his family with a healthier setting.
So that's how we first came to Ireland. Certainly among my first memories was going to the set of Moby Dick, entering a sort of strange bar with sawdust on the floor, people in costumes and an actor, who I later recognised as Gregory Peck in a big tall top hat as Captain Ahab, and being slightly frightened by everything but also very turned on. I think that started me on my course.
AW: Sets are pretty noisy and intimidating places, particularly for children, so do you think that experience of seeing what your father did meant that you became comfortable very early on with the whole film-making process?
AH: I don't like going on sets that I'm not involved in. I never liked it. Even from a very early age I don't remember them as tremendously hospitable places to be in. Particularly as my father often worked with a first assistant director, Tom Shaw, who was a bit of a merchant marine: beloved but tough. One was so threatened with all kinds of mayhem if one moved or spoke. Actually, sets were prohibitively horrible places to be in, in terms of feeling like the odd man out, or the uninvited guest.
AW: But in contrast to that, you're part of a very well-established family in Hollywood and American cinema, because of your father and grandfather. So was it an advantage, growing up in Ireland, that you weren't mixing with lots of other film-makers' families but led an isolated life?
AH: I don't really have a basis for comparison. I have to speculate about how life would have been if I'd grown up in Beverly Hills as opposed to the west of Ireland, but I know for sure I'm happy that it was the west of Ireland. It didn't necessarily equip me for later life, but it gave me an enchanted childhood and all kinds of outlets to imagine. I was speaking to a friend - by the way, I love coming to London because so many of my oldest friends and their mothers are here and I get to see everybody. I was saying that The Wizard of Oz wasn't a movie that tremendously moved me in its time, and she said, "Well, you had Ireland." And it's true, Ireland was my playground and the source of my imagination. Like that line in The Dead, "We used to go out walking, Gabriel, the way they do in the country." That was my childhood, and it was fantastic, bucolic, quiet, emotional and romantic, and also exciting because of horses and country pastimes and pursuits that I still love.
AW: As a teenager you made a film with your father in 1967, and I understand it was a difficult experience making the film. Do you think that experience put you off making movies?
AH: No. That movie was called A Walk with Love and Death, I was sort of 15 when the thing was conceived and 16 when we shot it. Not that I necessarily didn't know what I was doing or was too young or all the reasons that I could come up with to explain why it didn't work out, but the main reason for that was because Franco Zeffirelli was casting a wide net for a Juliet for his Romeo. And there was a school search that was going on. He expressed some interest in me, and his producer Dyson Lovell had called me back a couple of times to see me and I was pretty excited about that. Meanwhile my father had a three-picture deal with Fox, the first of which was Sinful Davey and the second was A Walk with Love and Death. And he pretty much decided that since I'd shown such enthusiasm about acting and declared myself ambitious to be an actress that he was doing me this great favour. Ultimately, he wrote a letter to Zeffirelli to say that I wouldn't be doing Juliet, which infuriated me, and that instead I would be working with him. I wasn't crazy about the part. I was a big snob at the time: I felt that the script was a bit saccharine, and my character was the daughter of a nobleman, and a young student, played by Assaf Dayan, son of Moshe Dayan, was travelling the land in 15th century France, looking for the sea. This struck me as being incredibly corny.
So, when I was called to Paris to undergo hair and makeup tests - Leonor Fini did the costumes, and Alexandre of Paris, who did Liz Taylor's hair on Cleopatra, put all these gold braids on my hair and I just felt like it was all too much. And Dad wouldn't let me wear makeup, which was seriously problematic. So the whole thing was a bit of a debacle. As it happened, it was on that visit to France that the revolution broke out. Students were rampant on the Left Bank and I couldn't leave Paris, so I was literally in a hotel room for four days without a hairbrush, seething. I finally got back to London but it was inevitable that we made that movie together, but I don't think it got any better than that, it was not a happy journey.
AW: Then, for a variety of reasons, you moved back to the US and your life changed. You ended up living in California and modelling, and through the 1970s, although you had small roles in a variety of films, it didn't seem that you really wanted to be an actress after that first experience. Did you kind of put that aside?
AH: Well, yeah, and also, I was really badly reviewed. I think the critic John Simon said I looked like an exhausted gnu. And you know, I was sensitive. Meanwhile, people seemed to like to take my photograph somewhat. I'd worked with David Bailey here, my mother was a good friend of Richard Avedon, and he was kind and photographed me for Vogue. So I started to think that maybe I could have a bit of a career as a model and not come up against the hard criticism. And I had a good time, I travelled, I learned a lot, I worked with great people, I had a modicum of success and it bolstered my ego.
AW: But through that period, you were in a relationship with Jack Nicholson and you appeared in small roles in his films. Did your relationship with him, because he was doing film after film, help prompt you to want to go back to acting?
AH: No, I'd always wanted to act, but it was a question of whether acting wanted me and whether the movies wanted me. I was always kind of recalcitrant when that idea would come up. For instance, Mike Nichols wanted me to test for a movie that Jack did, called The Fortune. I refused to test, not because I wanted to be given the part, but because the perception as far as I could gauge would be that everything was coming to me because of him. Because of him or because of my father. And I was clueless enough at the time not to realise that of course everything comes from people you know, everything is a handout, really. Especially in this kind of work, it's all about who you are, who you know, what you can do and how you can prove yourself. It took me a while to understand that. But at the same time, I went to acting classes and worked with a really great teacher, Peggy Feury, who gave me a lot of my confidence back. She taught Sean Penn, Michelle Pfeiffer; she had a lot of good people. She sort of changed my life and was a wonderful friend to me.
AW: While that was going on, your father was having something of a renaissance in the 1970s - he was making a series of great movies: The Man Who Would Be King, Fat City and Wise Blood. Did he come to you at any time during that period and talk to you about working for him again?
AH: No, I came to him. I was asked to host an evening that the American Film Institute put on and introduce clips from his films for that evening and also people that he'd worked with. At some point over the course of that evening, I said I'd like to try again. And I guess he was fool enough to try again. He was working on The Man Who Would Be King with a producer called John Foreman, who turned out to be a great friend to me and a great believer in me. And after Man Who Would Be King, he was making a film called Ice Pirates at MGM, and he offered me to test for the role of Maida, the greatest swordswoman in the universe. I am eternally grateful, it was a great part. I liked it a lot, I got to wear cool armour and monkey heads and stuff like that. And it was during the course of that movie... Also, I had John Matuszak as my lover in the film. I don't know if any of you know John Matuszak, but he was a linebacker for the Raiders; he was a fun romantic interest.
But anyway, during the course of that movie, John brought me a Richard Condon book called Prizzi's Honor, and said, "Read it and tell me what you think of Maerose." So I went away and read it, and of course it was fantastic. It was tongue-in-cheek and ironic and all the things I really like. So I came back and said, "John, it's fantastic. Were you thinking of me for Maerose?" And he said, "Yeah, and what about Jack opposite you as Charley Partanna and your dad to direct?" [drops head in hands, laughs] And then he kind of engaged me on this pursuit of getting Dad and Jack together. Which might sound simple - two people who quite liked each other at the time - but it was an ordeal because Dad lived in the jungle, [at Las Caletas] south of Puerto Vallarta, which was then a lot more remote than it is now. He lived on the coastline, only accessible by boat, with CB radio, no telephones, no electricity, nothing. And Jack, well, Jack likes to be in his den, it was the Olympics and he was not going to move. So John Foreman was saying that I had to go out there, and I knew full well that if I got Jack out there I would hear nothing but everything that wasn't right about the trip, so I refused. And John was furious at me. He showed up at six o'clock in the morning at my door and said, "We're going to the airport." I said no.
Anyway, eventually he gets to Vallarta, and he finds Jack there, buying shoes. And he said, "Jack, what are you doing in Vallarta? You should be with John, working this out." And Jack said, 'I'm going to do it." And obviously, what had happened was, he'd gotten out to the jungle - and Dad had satellite out there - so they'd sat and watched girl gymnasts together. And at one point, Jack had turned to Dad and said, "I don't know about your idea for the toupee, John. Are you trying to tell me it's supposed to be a comedy?" And Dad said yes. Up to that point, Jack hadn't known it was a comedy. Anyway, we then all found ourselves in New York making this movie.
It was great, it was a really fantastic experience. I went to church and Jack went to the gaming parlours. Dad was trying to find the voice of the movie. Finally he located this actress called Julie Bovasso, who was dying to play in the movie but Dad was also determined that his ex-secretary, who was now the rather ancient and gambling-addicted Ann Selepegno, would play the part of my aunt, and she couldn't act at all. So there would be these terrible sessions where I would try to loosen up Ann Selepegno. But Julie Bovasso gave him the voice of the movie - he got very excited one day and called Jack and I up to his hotel room to hear a recording of Julie reading the Aunt Amalia part. She was not to get the part but she was the voice of the movie, and she was the one who gave us the accent.
AW: This was 16 or 17 years since the last time you worked with your father. You've said it was fun and a great experience, but what was it like being directed by your father compared with that first time when you were a teenager? Did you find it a more rewarding experience?
AH: We had such a good time on that movie. For a start, I realised it wasn't personal. That sounds like a very obvious thing but it was huge. So I was able to actually learn as opposed to this defensive stance that I'd taken for all those early years. I think that had to do with being insecure and never being all that crazy about criticism, and he could be quite liberal with criticism. But once I learned that it was part of my job and not to take it personally and to try and please him as a director, then our professional life changed a lot, and actually our personal life changed a lot.
AW: Obviously, the film had tremendous success and you received an Academy Award for your performance. And then your whole professional life seemed to change dramatically with an incredible array of parts. And less than two years later you made The Dead with your father - it's such a marvellous movie and such a masterpiece. So could you speak about the making of this film, because your father was very ill. And it wasn't all shot in Ireland, was it?
AH: Only the last sequence, the exteriors of Dublin and the countryside were shot in Ireland. For the rest we were in a factory in Valencia, which is outside Los Angeles. It's an amusement park, for those of you who don't know. There were a number of warehouses that were going up there in the 70s and 80s, and a few independent television stations found their homes there. I think we were one of the first films to shoot in Valencia; there was no sound-proofing on the stage or anything. Stephen Grimes, who was his dear friend and production designer, did all the sets inside this warehouse. We were a unit. The Irish came over expecting Hollywood. They were staying at the Black Angus Hotel, we called it the Black Anguish. And they all learned line-dancing on Thursday nights. But they were pretty happy, just so long as the gin and tonic flowed. We had a great time and they were a fantastic group of people, beautiful actors. Donal McCann was just a dream to work with.
While we were there, we all got sick and we all missed a day, except for Dad. I had mononucleosis, everyone else got pleurisy and flu, but he was seamless. We didn't start until 10 in the morning and we didn't work after five at night, and I think we came in under our allotted time, on schedule. I remember one day, and this would never happen now, it was after that shot in the carriage scene. [Production manager] Tommy Shaw called lunch, and we'd already done this shot. Tommy came to Dad and said, "All right, John, so we'll go in close, right?" And Dad said, "I don't think there's any reason for that. Let's call Roberto." Roberto Silvi, the editor. Roberto was working upstairs in the warehouse, cutting while we were shooting. So the phonecall goes up, "Roberto, do you think we need close-ups here?" Roberto goes, "John, if you don't want a close-up, then don't do one." And Dad said, "Well, that's a wrap." And we all went home.
AW: You've suggested how much fun you had, but was it a difficult experience with your father being so ill?
AH: It was very painful to watch him sick, but on the other hand, if ever there were a brain that you wanted to keep throbbing on a mantelpiece, it was his. He was just this fantastic brain. As a matter of fact, the first time I read the script for The Dead - it all kind of happened undercover. My brother Tony had been in a huddle with Dad for a few months and I wasn't quite sure what it was about. I heard whisperings of Joyce and I knew Fionnnula Flanagan was interested. She was circling the campfire. Dad had to go into hospital for an eye operation for cataracts, and I went to visit him after the operation. His eyes were bandaged and he said to me, "See that script on the bedside table? Will you read it to me, honey?" So I sat and I read him the script and of course I was sobbing at the end. And he said, "Shall we do it?" And I said yes. And that was the inception of The Dead, for me anyway.
AW: There are lots of marvellous things about the film, but one great thing is the fact that it's such an integrated ensemble piece. There aren't many scenes but for the majority of the time, you get the impression that all the actors were either in shot or just about to be in shot. Is that something that's more difficult to do? How does it feel? It certainly looks like you're working much harder in that sense.
AH: It was almost like a stage play in that the choreography was very fluid. I think at this point in his life, things had gotten really simple. Things had gone through their hugely complicated stage and had kind of been taken down to a wonderful Zen smoothness in this film. He worked with one camera, Freddy Murphy. And... God, we were forever in that dining room, though. With goose. And I don't know what they'd been feeding that goose but it smelled like fish. I think it was just tremendously beautifully choreographed by a lot of people who had worked together and were old hands together, like Stephen [Grimes] and his assistant Josie [MacAvin] and Tommy [Shaw], and everyone was looking out for Dad, and everyone wanted to make it easy for him. The actors were primed. It was usually his method, before we started, to have not rehearsals really but round-table readings. And often he'd look like he'd dozed off, but he was just listening to the rhythms. One of his sole comments to me at that point of rehearsal was, "Be careful honey, you're out-Irishing the Irish." Which is okay, I understood that. It's my kind of method that I have to take it a bit further and then pull back. It's better that I make a fool of myself early on and then pull back a little. He said the same to me as Maerose; he said, "Watch out, don't out-Italian the Italians."
He was a great modulator, particularly for me, because I start out big. I remember particularly the last scene in the hotel room. This movie was hard for me because it was all about that scene. And there were whole days where I didn't have anything to say, while that scene was just looming on the horizon. When it came to that day, I'd worked myself up into a bit of a frenzy and I was very emotional from the moment I arrived on set that morning. So we went into rehearsal, and I was extremely emotional, crying profusely throughout that scene. And he obviously saw the need to take me down a bit. He said, "How's your horse, honey?" [miming sobbing] "It's fine, it's fine." But then, it finally came to it, and he said, "Don't play the end, play the beginning." So we achieved a nice balance there. I like this scene. I like the movie.
AW: From that, you've gone on to work on a whole variety of films, including working with young directors such as Wes Anderson. But the other major thing that's happened in the past 10 years is that you've begun directing yourself, with Bastard Out of Carolina, Agnes Browne, and I believe there's a new film in the pipeline, Give Us a Kiss. Is that a working title?
AH: No, that's the real title. It's from a book by an author called Daniel Woodrell, who writes self-described Ozark noir - country noir.
AW: He wrote Ride with the Devil, that Ang Lee filmed.
AH: Yeah, and also a really good new book called Winter's Bone. But this is about kind of crazy people in the Ozarks. I don't know why I always wind up doing white trash. I grew up in an estate in Ireland and now I do southern white trash.
Adrian Wootton: The question I want to ask you before opening it out to the audience is about your becoming a film director: do you think there were things you gained or learned from your father, or was there nothing that he taught you that you used later as a director?
Anjelica Huston: I think he probably taught me most of the things that I know, in terms of how movies work and how sets work. He always cast well, it was his theory that if you cast well, the job was mostly done. He had a key phrase: "Shoot the action", which sounds obvious, but a lot of people don't. And I think I sort of try to apply his essence, or things that I remember like that. There was a moment when I was going to North Carolina to shoot Bastard Out of Carolina. And I was reading up on direction and stuff when I remembered a very good chapter in my father's autobiography, Open Book, about film-making. It talks about where the camera should be and kind of obvious but important things. And I'd read the chapter, and the book has a very nice cover photograph by Eve Arnold, who was a dear friend of his. And so it came time for me to leave to go make the movie and you know, you're packing to go on location and everything weighs a tonne and you have to change planes and everything else. And I was like, "Am I going to bring this book?" So I brought the book with me.
I had this rented house in North Carolina, which was one of those empty, soulless houses, a summer vacation home. And I walked upstairs - and usually when I'm on location, I hole up in my bedroom and that's it. I have my television, my books and that becomes my little world. And I walked into the room and there was a bookstand, so I knew why I'd brought the book. And he sort of counselled me throughout - we'd have a sort of conversation at night. Later it came out in the Star - Anjelica talks to the dead. I'm sure that happens to anyone who's... and I don't want to sound religious here necessarily, but anyone who knows the power of prayer knows that prayers are answered. And he does answer me, especially if I ask the right question.
AW: In Agnes Browne, you did two things - you returned to Ireland, your childhood and spiritual home, and you also directed yourself, which I understand you found very difficult.
AH: I didn't mean for it to happen that way. I had Rosie O'Donnell all lined up for this part, and she begged off at the last moment, and we had about three weeks to go before we started this movie, so we were in a bit of a crisis. And it would have fallen apart if I hadn't done it, so that's why I decided to do it. The reason it's difficult is because you can't be everywhere at once. If you're the actress, you're late for the director; if you're the director, you can't set up the shot. The actress has to be in hair and makeup in the morning while the director has to be setting up. There's always this process of catching up with yourself, and not having enough time to either plan or recover. Most of the time, we'd set up a tent in the middle of the street in Ringsend [Dublin suburb] and it's not that great a thing, dressing and undressing in the Irish weather; albeit summer, it's cold. And every morning they wet down the street because they know it is going to rain. I'm glad I did it, it was a good experience, but it was hard. And especially if someone has a problem, and you're in that position and you're dealing with a lot of problems anyway, one or two problems will start to make you feel like the camel's back is breaking. And you don't want to lose your temper or disappoint the bondsman, so you try to keep an even keel, but sometimes I felt a little like I was slightly out of my depth.
AW: So you're not going to be casting yourself as poor white trash in Give Us a Kiss then?
AH: No.
AW: Okay, we're going to open it out to the audience at this point.
Q1: A lot of actors now do voices for animated features. Is that something that you have any interest in yourself?
AH: Yeah, I do quite a lot of animated voices. I'm currently Queen Clarion and the horrible Vesuvia in the latest Tinkerbell for Disney. And they're also quite lucrative and you don't have to put on a lot of makeup. I very much like doing voiceovers, and I also like doing readings. I do books on tape and stuff. I have fun with it.
Q2: Which directors do you admire, living or dead?
AH: Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, Woody Allen, to name a few.
AW: On Woody Allen, you made two films with him. Actors are desperate to work with him, but they all describe it as a rather mysterious process. How did you find working with him, on Crimes and Misdemeanors and Manhattan Murder Mystery?
AH: Well, Crimes and Misdemeanors was the first movie that I did with Woody. I'd heard about him that he didn't like a lot of commentary from actors about how they like their costumes or anything like that. He'd had a bit of trouble with an actress who didn't like her jacket. So I was determined that I was going to like my wardrobe. So when I was presented with pink argyle sweaters and one of those hairdos with an explosion at the front, I just loved it. I'd been making a movie in Canada, and I was going via New York and I knew I was going to be working with Woody in a few weeks, so I thought I'd call him up and maybe we could have a drink or coffee or something. So I took it upon myself to try to contact him. Of course that took a while. But finally he called back. So I suggested coffee, and he said, "That sounds great, but I'm sick. But maybe I'll be better on Thursday." And I said, "Well, great, so maybe we can have coffee on Thursday." But he said, "But what if I'm sick on Thursday?" So, we didn't meet - I went through all my costume fittings with his designer Jeffrey Kurland and horrible clothes.
So on the first day, I show up on set, and there's Sven Nykvist and Woody dressed exactly alike in woollen sailors' hats and big duffel coats. They're not very similar, but they were somehow symbiotic. And I walked on to the set, which was an apartment house on Lexington Avenue or something, and Woody goes, "OK, you start out in the kitchen, you take pills, you scream, you walk off, you leave the room, you come back"... a hundred and twenty-five directions, and all around popping pills and screaming at Martin Landau and I thought, "I'm never going to be able to do this." But I did it, and that was a stroke of good luck that we moved on because I don't know if I'd have been able to do too many shots of that scene. It was such a trial by fire, as I'd never met him before and I was really, really nervous. But he was very good to me, and he's got a good sense of humour, and he's always trying to get you out early.
Q3: Have you done much stage work? And would you ever consider coming to Britain to do a play?
AH: Yeah, I'd love to come to Britain to do a play. I haven't done a lot of stage work, and I have a bit of stage fright. I did a thing called Tamara about Tamara Lempicka many years ago in Los Angeles. It was kind of an arabesque. We did it at the American Legion on Highland Avenue and the audience followed the actors from one room to the next; I had a great time doing it. The reason really that I haven't done it is partly because I haven't found the part that I'm truly passionate about to leave my home and my family and my paycheque for months on end to come and work here. I'd love to do it but it would it have to be really, really worth my time.
Q4: What drew you to work with Wes Anderson?
AH: He wanted to meet me, and I looked at Bottle Rocket and Rushmore. I think he's very talented. He wanted to talk to me about The Royal Tenenbaums. We met in New York, and I immediately fell for him. He's really smart and has a very peculiar, interesting sensibility. I really liked the script a lot, but I didn't feel the character was all that developed and he was very open to changes and to discussion. I think so much of it has to do with being attracted to somebody or someone's personality, and I immediately liked Wes.
AW: After the success of Royal Tenenbaums, he actually wrote the part in The Life Aquatic for you, didn't he?
AH: Yeah. I'm going to work with him again in February. I'm going out to India. He's got a movie called The Darjeeling Limited about three brothers on a train in search of spiritual enlightenment. I come on at the end of the movie. He tells me I'm the Captain Kurtz of the movie. He's sending me small bronze casts of nuns like Mother Teresa, so I'm a little worried, but we'll see.
Q5: I was always puzzled why your father never directed any of the Hemingway short stories. He seemed the obvious director to do Fifty Grand or My Old Man. Was he never tempted or was it just copyright?
AH: I'm not sure. I know that he preferred, and I think The Dead would belie that, but I think he mostly liked doing stories that weren't all that brilliantly successful. I don't know, I'm probably talking nonsense but I think I heard him say that he preferred to take a story that wasn't necessarily all that well-written, that often less well-written stories make the best movies. I think in a way he's right. Certainly, if you look at F Scott Fitzgerald, he never really translates. I don't know, writing doesn't get much better than James Joyce, does it?
Q6: You mentioned William Wyler and I just wanted to ask a question about your grandfather, Walter Huston. Dodsworth is a film that's not shown very often on television or whatever. What did you think of Dodsworth, particularly your grandfather's performance in it, because he's amazing with Mary Astor. Nice DNA, by the way, to inherit.
AH: My grandfather Walter died two years before I was born, so I never knew him. And growing up in Ireland, we had the home projector and we watched Dad's movies. So I watched African Queen and Maltese Falcon and Treasure of Sierra Madre over and over again. Those were the movies I grew up with. And of course, Devil and Daniel Webster was part of that opus, and Treasure was my grandfather's seminal performance. I'd never seen Dodsworth, and I think it was when I first came to New York, when I was 21 or 22 years old. I was watching television one night and Dodsworth came on. I didn't know anything about it really. And I realised this was my grandfather, and suddenly he wasn't this little old gold prospector, he was this tall, rather elegant banker who has this wonderful love affair with Mary Astor and is married to the mad Ruth Chatterton. And I think the young David Niven is also in it. It's a fantastic movie, for those of you who haven't seen it. And I realised what a fantastic actor he was. And also, I know him through his movies, otherwise I would have no idea who my grandfather was.
Q7: I really enjoyed your performance in the recent TV series Huff and I wondered what your experience of working on a TV show was like, and playing a psychiatrist?
AH: Thank you. Did it play here? I had a great time on it, I really liked that show and I was really disappointed when they cancelled it. I keep thinking it was a mistake. I liked it a lot. First of all, it's fast. You're on your feet. It was the first time I played stoned on film - that was a lot of fun. I got to smoke grass with Hank Azaria, not really but fake grass. I liked the character, I thought she was quite a departure. Thank you, I'm glad you liked it.
Q8: It's really interesting to hear you talk about your dad, and it sounds like you have a real respect and almost an awe for your dad because of what a great man he was. Was there another side of that - was he ever like a dad to you, would he take you walking in the park or push you on swings?
AH: No.
Q8: Can you give me a bit more than no?
AH: Yes. He was bigger than anyone else, except for Friedrich Ledebur who played Queequeg on Moby Dick, who was maybe the most magnificent man I'd ever seen. But my father was pretty magnificent. He was taller and somehow grander - not grander in terms of snobbery because he was anything but, he was very much a man of the people. I think he would have made a very good politician, more in the kind of Huey Long mould. He could be very tough, he could be very judgmental and critical, he could be incredibly loving. I think it was easier for him when I was little; when I was going through adolescence, we both kind of had a problem with that. There were moments when he would be incredibly gentle and sweet, but there were other moments when he was the fire horse. He was a Leo and he was born in the Chinese year of the fire horse and you don't mess with them. Their eyes turn red when they're angry.
He was a brilliant storyteller, fantastic raconteur, he had a wicked sense of humour, often slightly at other people's expense, particularly if they were stupid. He didn't like stupid people. And he didn't like bigots. I think if there's something that I appreciate that he gave to me, it's across-the-board no judgments on people. He could be perfectly happy around a campfire in the Belgian Congo as with grand people. He was fearless, he didn't like cowardice of any kind, and if you showed it, it was an immediate red light. He'd go, "Oh really, that scares you? Well, let's try that again." And I completely adored him.
AW: You get a special thanks on Million Dollar Baby, and I'd be interested to know why. And Clint Eastwood played your father in White Hunter, Black Heart. Did he ring you up and ask you about him?
AH: I found Million Dollar Baby - I'll be modest. I was looking through the Los Angeles Review of Books and saw a book by an author called FX Toole about boxing. I inherited a love of boxing from my father - another thing he turned me on to early. I like boxing. So I read these short stories. And Al[bert] Ruddy, who produced Million Dollar Baby, and I had been talking about doing something else together and that hadn't worked out and I felt like I owed him one. So I told him I had a great story for him and I sent him Million Dollar Baby. So that's why he thanked me. But when Clint went to make White Hunter, Black Heart... I knew Clint, I'd sat beside him at dinner a few times, and I don't know why necessarily he didn't seek out members of my family more, but he didn't. But I think it was a very good effort. There were things about the movie that didn't really correlate to my own experience, but everyone's experience is different. And I think it was a very daring thing to do, and a lot of the time it worked and some of the time it didn't. But I think it was a valiant effort and it came from a good place. It was worthy if not successful. The design of the movie was wrong though - my father would never have had those sculptures in his house. Little things like that I know but you don't necessarily know.
Q9: You've played quite a variety of different types of women in your career. Is there a particular type you'd like to play that you haven't already?
AH: Docile blonde; docile short blonde.
AW: You played blonde in The Grifters.
AH: Yeah, I loved being blonde. It's true, they have more fun, even when they're cannibalising their children. Actually, most of that was a wig and I was really ugly offstage when I did that because they had to bleach the front of my hair and back, because when you bend your head you can see dark underneath. And my eyebrows. So I was really pretty.
AW: I have to say, it's one of my personal favourites of your movies. It's a fantastic film, a great adaptation of a tough novel, but I also imagine it must have been one of your most challenging roles because she's such a complicated character.
AH: Yeah, it was a hard time for me because I'd been going out with Jack Nicholson for a long time and that was right when we broke up, so the analogies were... I was literally cutting off my arm there. I think it's one of the best three parts I've ever had. I loved Stephen Frears - I had a fantastic time with him, I loved John Cusack and I thought Annette [Bening] did an amazing job. It was like having the most delicious dirty little secret, that movie. We went to town on those lines. There's nothing like Jim Thompson, you know. "Get off the grift, Roy." Stuff that's fantastic to work on. Once in a while, all the elements come together, and it has nothing to do with money or comfort, but everything to do with a great piece of material and being with people who inspire you. That's what it's about. That's what it should be about. It rarely happens that way, but it's like kismet, all the forces come together.
AW: We are going to have to stop. I'd really like to thank Anjelica Huston for being our terrific guest of honour here this evening.
AH: And thanks to my friends and family who came to support me.
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