“Remember,” Anjelica Huston’s father, John, used to tell her, “You can always put your hands in your pockets and walk away.”
Huston never took the legendary director’s advice. She’s been the scion of a famed Hollywood family, a top model, and an Oscar-winning actress in films like Prizzi’s Honor, The Grifters, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Dead, The Addams Family, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and The Witches. In Huston’s two autobiographies—2013’s A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York and 2014’s Watch Me: A Memoir—she also reveals herself to be an excellent writer whose keen eye for aesthetics and detail would have made her a great fashion editor, travel writer, or gossip columnist as well.
Her words allow the slightly tough and achingly chic Huston to reveal a strikingly cuddly, softhearted streak, especially regarding children and animals. “For a sophisticated girl,” she notes, “I could be tragically gullible.”
Her rolodex of experience is impressive. Scan these pages, and you’ll find Huston reminiscing about her encounters with Montgomery Clift, Diane von Furstenberg, Bill Murray, Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, Joni Mitchell, Prince Albert, Josephine Baker, John Cusack, Helmut Lang, Groucho Marx, Diana Vreeland, Huey P. Newton, and Mick Jagger, among others.
Most of all, Huston’s books show her determination to evolve and defy expectations—a drive that’s both inspiring and timely. In the early 1980s, famed director Tony Richardson cruelly told Huston, “Poor little you. So much talent and so little to show for it. You’re never going to do anything with your life.” Huston’s reaction will resonate with readers everywhere:
“Perhaps you’re right,” I answered. Inside I was thinking, “Watch me.”
An Irish Fairy Tale
“My life was mostly fantasy,” Huston writes of her imaginative childhood. Indeed, in A Story Lately Told she paints a lush, evocative, sensual portrait of a charmed, if lonely, storybook youth.
