Published in 2013
272 pages
Anjelica Huston is an American actress. Huston became the third generation of her family to win an Academy Award, when she won Best Supporting Actress for her performance in 1985’s Prizzi’s Honor, joining her father, director John Huston, and grandfather, actor Walter Huston. She also received Academy Award nominations for Enemies, a Love Story (1989) and The Grifters (1990).
Huston received British Academy Award nominations for her work in the Woody Allen films Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). Among her other roles, she starred as Morticia Addams in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993), receiving Golden Globe nominations for both, and played the Grand High Witch in the children’s movie The Witches (1990). She also played Mrs. Gwyneth Harrigan in Daddy Daycare (2003). She has frequently collaborated with director Wes Anderson, including The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004).
What is this book about?
Writing with an exuberant love of language and detail, Anjelica Huston shares her enchanted childhood in Ireland, her teen years in London, and her coming-of-age as a model and nascent actress in New York.
Living with her glamorous and artistic mother, educated by tutors and nuns, intrepid on a horse, Huston was raised on an Irish estate to which—between movies—her father brought his array of extraordinary friends, from Carson McCullers and John Steinbeck to Peter O’Toole and Marlon Brando. Every morning, Anjelica and her brother visited their father while he took his breakfast in bed. “What news?” he’d ask. “I’d seen him the night before,” Anjelica recalls. “There wasn’t much to report.” So she became a storyteller.
In London, where she lives with her mother and brother in the early sixties when her parents separate, Huston encounters the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac. She understudies Marianne Faithfull in Hamlet. Seventeen, striking, precocious, but still young and vulnerable, she is devastated when her mother dies in a car crash.
Months later she moves to New York, falls in love with the much older, brilliant but disturbed photographer Bob Richardson, and becomes a model. Living in the Chelsea Hotel, working with Richard Avedon and other photographers, she navigates a volatile relationship and the dynamic cultural epicenter of New York in the seventies.
A Story Lately Told ends as Huston launches her Hollywood life. The second part of her story—Watch Me—opens in Los Angeles in 1973.
