Anjelica Huston

Extremes

In her film debut A Walk with Love and Death (1969), in which she was directed by her father John Huston, the teenaged Anjelica Huston is given a carefully prepared-for and effective entrance, and her commanding and unusual appearance makes for a contrast with her rather high, shy voice. She’s a little green here when it comes to the expression of emotion, but in this medieval romance there is already a stubbornness and a passion in her that feels ready to break out.

Huston had grown up in Ireland, and it was a lonely childhood because her father was so often away shooting movies. She had wanted to play Juliet for Franco Zeffirelli and had auditioned for it, but her father scotched that by sending Zeffirelli a telegram declining the role for her so that her first appearance on screen would be for him. Both father and daughter had a rough time making A Walk with Love and Death and had to weather its negative reception; she even went on David Frost’s TV program and apologized for her performance. But both Huston and the film itself look rather beguiling now.

In the 1970s, Huston made a career for herself as a model, and she pursued Jack Nicholson and became part of a famous couple with him. She still made appearances as an actress sometimes, but often in very brief or expendable parts, and it was only in 1985 that she finally made an impression in Prizzi’s Honor (1985), which was again directed by her father, and for which she won an Academy Award for best supporting actress. As Maerose Prizzi, the outcast daughter of a mob family, Huston enters in a black and pink gown, like a cover girl, but right away Huston expresses Maerose’s barely controllable fury and hurt. She is gone for long sections of this movie, but this only works in her favor because the impact she has in her few scenes is so extreme, so dominating, so unusual.

Huston worked with her father again for his last film The Dead (1987), a James Joyce adaptation where she has to carry the whole ending of the movie with a lengthy monologue about a boy who died.  And then, when she was nearing the age of 40, Huston made four major movies in a row in which her full potential as a performer of extremes was realized. First she played the doomed flight attendant Dolores in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and fearlessly portrayed all kinds of unattractive emotions: fear, anger, deep insecurity, self-loathing.

The scorned mistress of a wealthy eye doctor named Judah (Martin Landau), Huston’s Dolores is observed by Allen in long takes as she threatens to tell Judah’s wife about their affair (“I want to speak to Miriam!” she keeps crying) and desperately tries to hold on to what she had with him. Allen gives us glimpses of Judah and Dolores in happier times, and so when Judah decides to have her killed, we have seen the yearning in her that is being remorselessly extinguished. Huston gives this woman an intense humanity even when she has been reduced to a murdered corpse staring upwards on the floor.

In Paul Mazursky’s masterpiece Enemies, A Love Story (1989), Huston plays the wife who seems to come back from the dead in post-World War II Brooklyn, and she almost immediately starts to bicker with her husband (Ron Silver) like old times. Huston sets the very tricky but enriching tone here with her gallows humor and her impatience, and she gives this woman a marvelous sort of posthumous gallantry that works to cover the hell of her loss (her two young children were killed by the Nazis). As in Prizzi’s Honor, Huston does not need a lot of screen time to seize the movie and control it with her epic-scale emotions, which are so extreme that her large frame often trembles to hold them down.

Huston moved further into the elemental as a sexy witch in Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches (1990), which involved a very elaborate make-up for her, but then she took her greatest part, Lilly Dillon in The Grifters (1990), an adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel that is one of the very best neo-noir films of this time period, like a nightmare in bright sunlight you can’t ever forget. In the novel, we learn that Lilly comes from a backwoods milieu and married at age 13, which is when she gave birth to her son Roy; she soon became a widow, and Lilly dumped Roy on her family as she worked her way up in the rackets as a B-girl with “class” and brains. Director Stephen Frears was unsure of Huston’s suitability for this type of role, and after an audition he had her wear a platinum blonde wig and tight clothes to give her a cheaper and hard-bitten look.

Lilly is a pretty brunette in the novel, and so Huston’s Amazonian blonde on screen is very different in type, and often visually terrifying, like a kind of big sister to the Beverly Michaels of Wicked Woman (1953). There’s something androgynous about her, and yet she has an odd daintiness of manner, too. Lilly Dillon is the sort of woman who can matter-of-factly tell someone, “I’ll have you killed,” yet her own power is tied to a mob boss who threatens her and finally burns her hand with a cigar after he catches her stealing from him. (Frears shoots this as if the mob boss is stepping on her like a bug.)

More unsettling than this scene of torture and violence is the scene immediately afterward where Huston’s Lilly compliments her boss on his suit, her voice tentative, shy. This is a role where all of Huston’s most out-there contradictions, particularly the softness that underlies her managing power and strength, are as striking as Elmer Bernstein’s versatile score for the movie, which is sprightly but then all-out foreboding and ultra-dramatic.

The ending of The Grifters is a confrontation between Lilly and her son Roy in which she needs to take the money he has saved on the grift so she can get out of town and he is loath to give it to her. Huston exactly catches a moment from the book where Thompson describes Lilly going to get a glass of water: “Shakily, a cold deadness growing in her heart…” And she does not flinch from the moment when Lilly attempts to seduce her son; she even gives him a lingering kiss, which is not in the book. Fatally distracted, Roy takes a sip of his water and that’s when his mother swings a bag at him with all her considerable strength and the glass cuts his throat open and blood runs out all over the money on the floor.

In the novel, Thompson describes Lilly “matter-of-factly” separating the bloody bills from the unbloody, but then we read that “a great sob tore through her body, and she wept uncontrollably.” Huston puts herself so deeply into this situation that her body starts to heave and react in a way that is like something from a Greek tragedy, as if this were a noir Medea. Thompson has Lilly pull herself together finally and laugh and give “the thing on the floor an almost jeering glance,” but that’s too much for Huston, who seems to intuit that such a reaction would lessen the power of what she has portrayed for us.

We see Huston’s Lilly going down in an elevator with her money, Bernstein’s score getting tinkly/mournful as she does, and her face is a mask, unreadable. Movie-lovers might remember the tear-stained face of Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) at the end of The Maltese Falcon (1941), her father’s first movie, in which the anti-heroine descends in a similar elevator on her way to prison for murder. Bernstein’s score gets grander/dramatic again, and the last we see of Huston’s Lilly she is looking like an animal on the defensive, past human, or past humanity. And it is Huston who has dared to show us what this process could look like.

She got an Oscar nomination for The Grifters, this time for best actress, and lost to Kathy Bates in Misery. (Bates played a woman just as scary as Lilly Dillon, though her Annie Wilkes finally gets vanquished in the end.) Huston worked regularly after that, doing Morticia Adams in The Addams Family (1991), directing the very upsetting Bastard Out of Carolina (1996), and then appearing regularly in Wes Anderson movies in the 21st century; she also wrote two memoirs about her life and career that had a sophisticated, distant tone and gave very entertaining interviews for them.

But what lingers is those four films in a row from 1989-1990, a run capped by her Lilly Dillon in The Grifters, which is her signal achievement in the way that Dodsworth (1936) is the high-water mark for her grandfather Walter Huston. In watching The Grifters, and re-watching it, it feels like Huston is revealing something not just about herself but about human nature that had never quite been put on screen before. It leaves a mark, this performance, like the scar on Lilly’s hand from that cigar.