otherpeople
John Marcellus Huston (; August 5, 1906 – August 28, 1987) was an
American filmmaker, screenwriter and
actor. He was known for directing the films
The Maltese Falcon (1941),
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948),
Key Largo (1948),
The Asphalt Jungle (1950),
The African Queen (1951),
Moulin Rouge (1952)
The Misfits (1960),
The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and
Annie (1982). He was the son of actor
Walter Huston and the father of actress
Anjelica Huston and actor
Danny Huston.
Childhood
Huston was born in
Nevada, Missouri, a son of
Canadian-born actor,
Walter Huston and his wife Rhea Gore, a sports reporter. Huston was of
Scots-Irish descent on his father's side
[wc.rootsweb.com] and
English and
Welsh on his mother's. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, John Marcellus and Adelia (Richardson) Gore. At the age of ten, Huston suffered a serious illness which left him nearly bedridden for several years. This spurred him to pursue a full life, both intellectually and physically.
Career
Huston began his film career as a
screenwriter on films such as
Juarez (1939),
Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940) and
High Sierra (1941).
Huston's films were insightful about human nature and human predicaments. They also sometimes included scenes or brief dialogue passages that were remarkably prescient concerning environmental issues that came to public awareness in the future, in the period starting about 1970; examples include
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and
The Night of the Iguana (1964).
The Misfits (1960) was written by
Arthur Miller and featured an all-star cast including
Clark Gable,
Marilyn Monroe,
Montgomery Clift, and
Eli Wallach, and was the last screen appearance of screen icons Gable and Monroe. It is well-known that Huston spent long evenings carousing in the Nevada casinos after filming, surrounded by reporters and beautiful women, gambling, drinking, and smoking cigars. Gable remarked during this time that "if he kept it up he would soon die of it."
After filming the documentary
Let There Be Light on the psychiatric treatment of soldiers for shellshock, Huston resolved to make a film about
Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. The film,
Freud the Secret Passion, began as a collaboration between Huston and
Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre dropped out of the film and requested his name be removed from the credits. Huston went on to make the film starring
Montgomery Clift as Freud.
In the 1970s, he was frequently an actor in
Italian films, and continued acting until the age of 80 (
Momo, 1986).
Huston is also famous to a generation of fans of
J. R. R. Tolkien's
Middle-earth stories as the voice of the
wizard Gandalf in the
Rankin/Bass animated adaptations of
The Hobbit (1977) and
The Return of the King (1980).
Many of his films were edited by
Russell Lloyd, who was nominated for an Oscar for editing
The Man Who Would Be King (1975).
The six-foot-two-inch, brown-eyed director also acted in a number of films, with distinction in
Otto Preminger's
The Cardinal (1963) for which he was nominated for the
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and in
Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) as the film's central corrupt businessman and incestuous father.
John Huston received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1983.
-
Academy Awards
In 1941, Huston was nominated for an
Academy Award for
Best Adapted Screenplay for
The Maltese Falcon. He was nominated again and won in 1948 for
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for which he also received the
Best Director award.
Huston received 15
Oscar nominations in the course of his career. In fact, he is the oldest person ever to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar when, at 79 years old, he was nominated for
Prizzi's Honor (1985). He also has the unique distinction of directing both his father Walter and his daughter Anjelica in
Oscar-winning performances (in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and
Prizzi's Honor, respectively), making the Hustons the first family to have three generations of Academy Award winners.
In addition, he also directed 13 other actors in Oscar-nominated performances:
Sydney Greenstreet,
Claire Trevor,
Sam Jaffe,
Humphrey Bogart,
Katharine Hepburn,
José Ferrer,
Colette Marchand,
Deborah Kerr,
Grayson Hall,
Susan Tyrrell,
Albert Finney,
Jack Nicholson and
William Hickey.
Personal life
Huston, an
atheist,
[The religion of director John Huston] was married five times to:
1. Dorothy Harvey - This marriage lasted 7 years and ended in 1933.
2. Lesley Black - It was during his marriage to Black that he embarked on an affair with married
New York socialite Marietta FitzGerald. While her
lawyer husband was helping the war effort, the pair were once rumoured to have made love so vigorously, they broke a friend's bed.
[Running Around in High Circles] When her husband returned before the end of the
Second World War, Huston went back to Hollywood to await Marietta's divorce. However, on a trip to
Barbados she fell in love with billionaire British
MP Ronald Tree, and decided to marry him instead. Huston was heartbroken, and after an affair with the fashion designer and writer
Pauline Fairfax Potter, married again.
3.
Evelyn Keyes - The Hustons adopted a son Pablo (from Mexico); (his affair with Fairfax Potter continued during the marriage).
4. Enrica Soma - They had two children: a daughter,
Anjelica Huston, and a son, Walter Antony "Tony" Huston, now an attorney. Soma also had a daughter,
Allegra Huston, as the result of an extramarital affair with
John Julius Norwich; Huston treated the girl as one of his own children following Soma's death four years later.
5. Celeste Shane.
All marriages ended in
divorce except his fourth, to Soma, who died. In addition to his children with Soma, he was also the father of the director
Danny Huston (with the author
Zoe Sallis).
Among his friends were
Orson Welles and
Ernest Hemingway. According to a documentary film about Huston's life (
John Huston: The Man, the Movies, the Maverick), he struck and killed a female pedestrian with his car at the corner of Gardner and Sunset in Los Angeles when he was in his late 20s. He was exonerated of wrongdoing at the follow-up inquest.
Huston visited
Ireland in 1951 and stayed at
Luggala,
County Wicklow, the home of
Garech Browne, a member of the
Guinness family. He visited Ireland several times afterwards and on one of these visits he purchased and restored a
Georgian home, St Clerans, of
Craughwell,
County Galway. He became an Irish citizen in 1964 and his daughter Anjelica attended school in Ireland at
Kylemore Abbey for a number of years. A film school is now dedicated to him on the
NUIG campus. Huston is also the inspiration for the
1990 film White Hunter Black Heart starring
Clint Eastwood, who also directed.
Huston was an accomplished
painter who wrote in his autobiography, "Nothing has played a more important role in my life". As a young man he studied at the
Smith School of Art in Los Angeles but dropped out within a few months. He later studied at the
Art Students League of New York. He painted throughout his life and was particularly interested in
Cubism and the American school of
Synchromism. He had studios in each of his homes and owned a wide collection of art including a notable collection of
Pre-Columbian art[by Directors, Karl French, Granta 86, 2004, ISBN 0 90 314169 8] In 1982 he created the label for [[Château Mouton Rothschild].
A heavy smoker, he died from
emphysema on August 28, 1987 in
Middletown,
Rhode Island. A few weeks before, Marietta visited him and his
electrocardiogram "started jumping with excitement as soon as she entered the room." She was, his friends maintained, the only woman he ever really loved.
Huston is interred in the
Hollywood Forever Cemetery in
Hollywood, California.
Filmography
[
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As director
As screenwriter
As actor
Does not include films which he also directed
- The Cardinal (1963, dir: Otto Preminger)
- Candy (1968, director: Christian Marquand)
- Rocky Road to Dublin (Documentary) (as Interviewee, 1968, director: Peter Lennon)
- De Sade (1969, dir: Cy Endfield)
- Myra Breckinridge (1970, dir: Michael Sarne)
- Man in the Wilderness (1971, dir: Richard C. Sarafian)
- The Bridge in the Jungle (1971)
- Rufino Tamayo: The Sources of his Art (documentary) (1972, dir: Gary Conklin)
- Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973, dir: J. Lee Thompson)
- Chinatown (1974, dir: Roman Polanski)
- Breakout (1975)
- The Wind and the Lion (1975, dir: John Milius)
- Tentacles (1977, dir: Ovidio G. Assonitis)
- The Greatest Battle (1978, dir: Umberto Lenzi)
- The Bermuda Triangle (1978, dir: René Cardona, Jr.)
- Angela (1978, dir: Boris Sagal)
- The Visitor (1979, dir: Giulio Paradisi)
- Winter Kills (1979, dir: William Richert)
- A Minor Miracle (1983, dir: Raoul Lomas)
- Notes from Under the Volcano (documentary) (as himself, 1984, dir: Gary Conklin)
- Lovesick (1984, dir: Marshall Brickman)
- The Black Cauldron (1985) Narrator
- Momo (1986, dir: Johannes Schaaf)
