Background and career
Anjelica Huston ( HEW-stən; born July 8, 1951) is an American actress. 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 pursue acting in the early 1980s and 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 Oscar, when she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, joining both John and Walter Huston in this recognition. Huston achieved further critical and popular recognition for playing an accomplished horse breeder on the Nebraska plains, Clara Allen, on the hit TV mini-series Lonesome Dove, 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 (1991–1993), and an adventurous writer in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). She 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 series (2008–2015). Her other notable film credits include The Crossing Guard (1995), Ever After (1998), Daddy Day Care (2003), Choke (2008), 50/50 (2011) and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019). On television, Huston has also acted in Family Pictures (1993), Buffalo Girls (1995), The Mists of Avalon (2001), Huff (2006), Medium (2008–2009), Transparent (2015–2016), and Towards Zero (2025). 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). Huston directed the films Bastard Out of Carolina (1996) and Agnes Browne (1999) and wrote the memoirs A Story Lately Told (2013) and Watch Me (2014).
Huston was born on July 8, 1951, in 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 [and two] 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 [for filming]".
Her father's film A Walk with Love and Death (1969), where Huston played the 16-year-old French noblewoman Claudia opposite Assi Dayan, marked her screen debut. She had been in the running to play Juliet in director Franco Zeffirelli's adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (1968), but Huston withdrew herself from consideration when her father decided to cast her as Claudia in A Walk With Love and Death. Huston felt that she was wrong for the role as Claudia, and has commented on the experience that her father "miscast me first time out and I think he realized that. I was ready to act, but I wasn't ready to act for him ... I was difficult, I didn't want to act with no makeup, although I'd have done it for Franco." Father and daughter had a fractious relationship on set, with the young Anjelica having difficulty learning her lines and focusing, while her father grew more impatient and angry at directing her. Critics derided her performance. Huston and her mother were photographed by Arnaud De Rosnay—whom she met at age 16 in Switzerland—in October 1968 for Vogue. Shortly afterwards, her mother died in a car accident, and the young Huston relocated to New York City as she "sort of fled London because of the memories; I didn't really know what to do with myself, and I wasn't quite sure what my father's intentions were for me—whether he was going to put me in a convent or launch me as an actress. Well, he'd already tried to do that, and we'd had a hard time on the making of that first film we did together". Inspired by models Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy, Huston decided to pursue modelling, and through photographer Richard Avedon, a friend of her parents, she met Diana Vreeland who proposed to Huston her first American Vogue photoshoot, which took place in Ireland. She described it as "very innovative because they presaged the whole sort of Gypsy look". Huston became a frequent subject of Bob Richardson, with whom she lived until 1973. She was signed to Ford Models and in the early 1970s, worked in Europe "for a couple of years". She walked the runway for brands such as Zandra Rhodes, Yamamoto, Armani and Valentino. Along with Pat Cleveland, Pat Ast, Elsa Peretti, Karen Bjornson and Alva Chinn, she became one of fashion designer Halston's favored troupe of models, nicknamed the Halstonettes.
After breaking up with Richardson, Huston moved to California to focus on acting. While she "didn't do much there for three years", she filmed a small role in The Last Tycoon (1976), based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel of the same name and starring then-boyfriend Jack Nicholson. Bob Rafelson's remake The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), based on the novel by James M. Cain, featured Huston as the fling of a Depression-era drifter, played by Nicholson. She briefly appeared in the drama Frances (1982) and the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (1984) before obtaining a larger role in the science fiction film The Ice Pirates (1984). Her father cast Huston as Maerose, the daughter of a New York Mafia clan head whose love is scorned by a hit man, in the film adaptation Prizzi's Honor (1985), which also starred Nicholson. She was paid the SAG scale rate of US$14,000 for her role. When her agent called up the movie's producer to request if she could be paid more, she was told "Go to hell. Be my guest—ask for more money. We don't even want her in this movie." Huston, who was not only John Huston's daughter but also Jack Nicholson's girlfriend at the time, wrote in her 2014 memoir Watch Me that she later overheard a production worker saying: "Her father is the director, her boyfriend's the star, and she has no talent." Nevertheless, Huston garnered positive notices for her performance. The New York Times described her part as a "wonderful character, far darker and more complex than is indicated by her self-deprecating wisecracks (I'm a family scandal. I got a reputation to keep up). She's a riveting presence and if Miss Huston, the daughter of the director, doesn't get an Oscar nomination for this performance, I'll be very surprised." Indeed, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, making her the third generation of her family to win an Oscar. Huston starred opposite Michael Jackson in the 17-minute US$30 million 3D film Captain EO, written by George Lucas and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, which ran from 1986 at Disneyland and Epcot, and later at Tokyo Disneyland and Euro Disneyland. Coppola next cast her as the girlfriend of an army platoon sergeant in Gardens of Stone (1987), a film that dealt with the effect of the Vietnam War on the United States homefront. Film critic Roger Ebert praised her onscreen chemistry with co-star James Caan, remarking that "the romance between Caan and Huston is one of the great adult love stories in recent movies". Huston starred in her father's last film, 1987's The Dead, as the wife of an academic. According to her, her father remained a filmmaking virtuoso despite his ill health: "He was so sick, but he could literally do it with his eyes closed. He knew when we were going to get a take way long before the camera rolled. I mean the timing was so precise that he could tell everything, exactly how it was going to go." The pressures of filming and watching her father's health deteriorate had an adverse effect on Anjelica Huston's own health, developing Epstein-Barr syndrome during production. John died nearly four months before the film's release date, upon which it received two nominations at the 60th Academy Awards. For her performance, she won as Best Supporting Female at the 3rd Independent Spirit Awards. In 1988, Huston played the love interest of an engaging, multi-talented, middle-class Yale University graduate in Mr. North, which was more of a family project, directed by half-brother Danny Huston, and made a cameo appearance in the film adaptation A Handful of Dust. Despite her limited screen time, Vincent Canby of The New York Times praised her portrayal in the latter as the "single most stunning performance" but called the film "both too literal and devoid of real point."
Huston earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of a flight attendant having an affair with a respected family guy in Woody Allen's dramedy Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). The drama Enemies, A Love Story, also released in 1989, featured her as the long-vanished wife of a Holocaust survivor. In a positive review for the film, Roger Ebert asserted: "Parts, especially the scenes with Huston, are heartwarming in a strange way, because they show one human being accepting the weaknesses of another". For her role, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In The Witches (1990), based on the 1983 book of the same name by Roald Dahl, Huston starred as the Grand High Witch, the all-powerful leader of the world's witches, shared the cast with Mai Zetterling and Rowan Atkinson. She and the costume designer Marit Allen originally brought a different dress for the role, but the director Nicolas Roeg rejected it as "not sexy". Huston recalled: "That was the first time I'd imagined that this horrible creature in a children's movie should have sex appeal. It simply had not occurred to me. But of course, Nic was absolutely right. His vision was diabolical and dark and brilliantly funny. If a witch was to be at the center of this plot, she needed to be sexy to hold the eye." The character's monstrous version was prepared by Jim Henson's Creature Shop and "took over six hours to apply and almost as much time to remove at the end of the day." Despite a lackluster box office response, the film was applauded by critics and has obtained a cult following over the years; it has also remained one of Huston's favorite roles.
Huston next portrayed a veteran con artist in the neo-noir thriller The Grifters (also 1990). Director Stephen Frears first contacted her about playing Lilly in 1989 while she was filming Crimes and Misdemeanors, but after reading the script, she was unsure. Although she was "transfixed" by the story and the character, the script alarmed her with its explicitness. A few months later, Frears contacted Huston again to see if she was still interested. Still wavering, Huston's talent agent Sue Mengers told her bluntly "Anjelica, if Stephen Frears tells you he wants you to shit in the corner, then that's what you must do." The next day Huston auditioned for the role in front of Frears at the Chateau Marmont. Frears' initial reluctance to cast Huston because she looked too much like "a lady", was resolved with the decision to cheapen her look with a bleached blond wig and "vulgar clothes". To research her part, she studied women dealers at card parlors in Los Angeles County, California. Her performance earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Huston obtained the part of Morticia Addams, the stern, aloof matriarch of the titular family, in The Addams Family (1991). She based aspects of her performance on her friend Jerry Hall to give the character more warmth, and in her 2014 memoir Watch Me, she described the filming as "long and arduous". It was decided that the character of Morticia should have eyes which slanted upwards at the sides, an effect which was achieved by attaching an elastic strap to the back of Huston's head via fabric tabs glued at her temples, which pulled the corners of her eyes upwards. The bands caused extended discomfort to Huston, and would snap at the slightest turn of Huston's head, causing a grueling repair time. Eventually, she learned to pivot and turn on her feet without moving her upper body or head. The Addams Family was a commercial success, grossing over US$191 million worldwide, and prompted a sequel, Addams Family Values (1993). For both installments, Huston garnered Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical. Following a small role in the satire The Player (1992), Huston reunited with Woody Allen on Manhattan Murder Mystery, in which she played the friend of a married couple investigating the death of their neighbor's wife, and also portrayed a mother struggling to parent her autistic child, in the ABC miniseries Family Pictures. She received a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Manhattan Murder Mystery, and a nomination for Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film at the 51st Golden Globe Awards for Family Pictures. In 1995, Huston portrayed a Cuban refuge attempting to stay in America in the comedy The Perez Family and the former wife of a tormented man (played by Jack Nicholson) in Sean Penn's sophomore directorial effort, the drama The Crossing Guard. Her performance in the latter was praised, and she received nominations for Best Supporting Actress from the Hollywood Foreign Press and the Screen Actors Guild. Based on the 1990 novel of the same name, the CBS miniseries Buffalo Girls —in which she starred as frontierswoman Calamity Jane, opposite Melanie Griffith and Reba McEntire— earned Huston an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Movie.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
