Anjelica Huston Presents Her New Memoir at Miami Book Fair International 2013

John Huston with his teenage daughter, Anjelica in 1968, at St. Clerans, the Huston estate in the West of Ireland (photo credit: Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos); A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London and New York cover

MIFF executive director Jaie Laplante will be leading a conversation with Academy Award-winning actress Anjelica Huston at Miami Book Fair International on Friday, November 22nd as part of the Fair’s popular “Evenings With….” readings.  The event will focus on Huston’s riveting new memoir, A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London and New York.

Even Anjelica’s birth was cinematic. Two days after she was born on July 8, 1951, her father, legendary director and actor John Huston, got the news by a barefoot runner bearing a telegram deep in the heart of the Belgian Congo, where he was filming The African Queen; he glanced at it and stuffed it into his pocket. When Katharine Hepburn insisted on knowing what the news was, John said, “It’s a girl. Her name is Anjelica.” 

Angelica Huston in The Grifters (1990); accepting her Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Prizzi’s Honor; in The Addams Family

Angelica’s memoir takes you through her unconventional childhood growing up on an estate in Ireland, to her life as a teenager in London during the heyday of its music scene, to her modeling career, and her experiences in acting. Her first notable part was in Bob Rafelson’s remake of the classic noir movie The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), in which Jack Nicholson, with whom Huston was living at the time, was the star.

Several years later, her father perfectly cast her as Maerose, the calculating daughter of a Mafia don whose love is scorned by a hit man (Nicholson again) in his film adaptation of Richard Condon’s Mafia-satire novel Prizzi’s Honor (1985), also starring Kathleen Turner and Robert Loggia (MIFF 2012 Tributee). Angelica won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance, becoming the third generation of her family to win an Academy Award.

Angelica Huston and Raul Julia in Addams Family Values; Angelica Huston and Jack Nicholson had an on-again off-again relationship that spanned from 1973 to 1989.

Huston thereafter worked prolifically, including notable roles in Francis Ford Coppola’s Gardens of Stone (1987), Barry Sonnenfeld’s film versions of the Charles Addams cartoons The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993), in which she portrayed Addams matriarch Morticia, Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004).  One of finest on-screen performances was as Lilly, the veteran, iron-willed con artist in Stephen Frears’ The Grifters (1990), for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. A sentimental favorite is her performance as the lead in her father’s final film, an adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead (1987). 

Spend An Evening with Anjelica Huston on Friday, Nov. 22 at 8:00 p.m. at Chapman Conference Center (Building 3, 2nd Floor, Room 3210) at Miami Dade College’s Wolfson Campus. Cost is $40 (includes a signed copy of her new memoir A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London and New York). The 30th Edition of Miami Book Fair International runs Nov. 17 – 24. Visit miamibookfair.com. — Tatyana Chiocchetti

Return to home page.