All about Anjelica

>> Anjelica Huston on her father and being Agnes Browne

by MATTHEW HAYS

Despite an Oscar and that Hollywood royalty lineage, Anjelica Huston doesn't sound the least bit pretentious or snooty, on the phone from her L.A. home. "Uh, could you excuse me for just a second?" she asks, "my dog is about to be ill on the carpet."

Huston is busy plugging her latest project, Agnes Browne, the big-screen adaptation of Brendan O'Carroll's bestselling novel about a long-suffering Irish matriarch who does a lot of overcoming. When her husband dies, she overcomes; when a nasty local loan shark leans on her for the cash she owes him, she overcomes; when her best friend dies... you get the idea. Though Huston has directed before (the made-for-cable Bastard Out of Carolina), this is her first time directing herself in a lead role.

"It actually wasn't intended this way at all," says Huston. "Rosie O'Donnell was set to do the part but she pulled out two weeks before shooting began. She'd just adopted her third child and was exhausted. Doing both was daunting. I certainly didn't get enough sleep. Ideally I would have had another actress or had twice as much time."

Shades of Browne

Huston carries the Browne character well, as she suffers through various hardships, all the while longing to attend a Tom Jones concert. Though the film is set in '67, the well-preserved singer appears in the film as himself (looking like he's been taking too many formaldehyde baths).

Browne is a brashly sentimental tale, one which risks getting too feelgood for its own good. But Huston says stepping over the line into the maudlin was never a worry for her. "You can't really have those kinds of judgments about the material you're working on. I think we should be as maudlin as we like and embrace our sentimentalism. One man's meat is another man's maudlin. To be true to the story, I had to play it for all the reasons I chose it--and that meant including the sentimentality."

Huston's strange-but-striking film career would seem inevitable--it is, after all, embedded in her genetic code. Grandpa was the Canadian-born Walter Huston, who won a best-supporting-actor Oscar in '48 for his turn in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Papa was John Huston, a multiple Oscar-winning director and occasional actor (see Chinatown or Battle for the Planet of the Apes). Anjelica's first foray into acting was in A Walk With Life and Death ('69), made by her father when she was a mere 16. The film tanked, and is generally regarded as the low point in Papa Huston's extensive career. "That was a difficult experience," his daughter recalls. "I really didn't want to do it. I wasn't getting along with my father at the time--he was very tough on me. His idea was that this would be a good thing, but I was very strong and willful. He didn't like my adolescence much."

Late bloomer

After that rather disastrous debut, Huston withdrew from acting and the limelight for many years. She then did some fashion modelling after her sharp features caught the eye of photographer Richard Avedon. She returned to film triumphantly, with supporting roles in The Last Tycoon and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Her acerbic, fast-talking role in Prizzi's Honor ('85, directed by her father) led to her Oscar win. "That was a big mixture of emotions," she says now. "I hated the way I looked. I cried that day. I was almost hoping I didn't win, so then I wouldn't have had to make a speech." She has continued to work extensively with a broad range of directors, including Stephen Frears, Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky.

Huston says the biggest lesson her father imparted upon her as a director was the ability to juggle a broad range of tasks. "He was a better teacher as he got older. He could handle so many different things at once and control it all beautifully. I wish he was still around. It was really only at the end of his life that I got a sense of how much knowledge he had to impart." :

Agnes Browne opens Friday, March 31