Stephen Frears and Anjelica Huston are making their getaway from a morning spent selling dozens of reporters on ”The Grifters,” a dark and twisted film about a trio of con artists caught in their own deadly scam. As the elevator doors close, Huston turns to Frears and says, ”Everybody keeps saying that actors are grifters.” The director raises his eyebrows in a noncommital response.
If actors are grifters, then keep a hand on your wallet when you`re around Anjelica Huston. She dominates ”The Grifters” (one of three recent movies based on the hard-boiled fiction of the late Jim Thompson; it is scheduled to open in Chicago Jan. 25) like a card cheat holding a fistful of aces. Huston`s portrayal of Lily Dillon, a hard-bitten loser who refuses to fall, is the latest in a string of unconventional roles that have arguably made Huston Hollywood`s most compelling-and certainly its most unsettling-actress.
In person, Huston exudes a quiet, aristocratic sense of style and grace. Today she`s dressed in a chic red suit com-plemented by low black heels, a gold watch and dangling earrings. Huston`s bright red lipstick is a playful counterpoint to her inpenetrable composure, a sly suggestion that underneath those high cheekbones and clear white skin is a woman who`s seen it all.
”I`ve had a very varied life,” she says later, encapsulating a resume stained with champagne and tears. ”I`ve lived in Europe and America, I`ve known high and happy times, and dismal and bereft times. I`ve lost a parent to a sharp, instant death, and another to a lingering, drawn-out death. All in all, I`d say I have a bit of history for all the characters I play.”
There`s a whale of a subtext to Anjelica Huston, and it`s indelibly colored by her relationship with two powerful men: her father, the late John Huston, one of the most distinquished directors in the history of American cinema; and Jack Nicholson, a major Hollywood star for the past two decades, and Huston`s lover for 17 of those years. It doesn`t take a Freudian to discern a pattern, but it helps.
”At a certain point,” explains Huston, ”any child has to come to terms with a strong father. So it`s not unusual that I`d be attracted to other strong men. It`s the whole idea of putting yourself in the same frame of mind as when you were 6 or 8. At some point, you become aware of how the outside world looks at these men, and it becomes a matter of learning whatever is useful to you in terms of your own life.
”The older you get,” concludes Huston, 39, ”the more objective you can become about those relationships.”
Lily Dillon is objective to the extreme: She`s a tough cookie in her early 40s who, when pushed to the edge, reacts with the controlled fury of a coiled snake. ”She`s a bit of an Irish sea, this woman,” says Huston. ”A slate-gray sea with a lot of roiling underneath.”
In other words, she`s just the kind of woman that Huston can call her own. Huston got a grip on the character by observing the women in the smoky card parlors of Los Angeles and by trading her dark brown hair for brittle, platinum tresses. But such devices aren`t enough for Huston; she doesn`t truly become a character until she finds what it is about them that pushes her own emotional buttons.
”I`m not very interested in the way actors get to that point,” says Frears, whose earlier films include ”Dangerous Liaisons,” ”Prick Up Your Ears,” and ”My Beautiful Laundrette.” ”Sometimes they can get quite agitated, but that`s part of the job. At the outset, you`ve basically gone to that person with a question: `Can you deliver the payoff?` ”
Huston delivered.
Melanie Griffith was originally cast as Lily, but is said to have dropped out of the film because of her recent pregnancy. Griffith, who somehow made it to ”The Bonfire of the Vanities,” just may not have wanted to tangle with Lily, who`s something like her rebellious character in ”Something Wild” gone truly bad.
Lily is a cool cucumber who travels the country manipulating the odds on horse races for her mobster boss. John Cusack plays her son, a two-bit con named Roy. Lily had Roy when she was 14, and he was brought up as her younger brother-until Roy ran away to live the same kind of lonely, manipulative life as his mother.
”Pretty rotten of me to be a child when you were a child,” Lily tells Roy at the conclusion of a tale that`s heavy with the scent of incest. It`s at this point, in a sequence that Cusack says the actors were nervously anticipating for weeks, that the emotional violence of a lifetime turns physical.
”I had this image as I was doing that scene of holding Roy as a baby,”
says Huston of the last-minute revelation that fueled her performance. ”I was in pain when I was making that movie, both because of the woman who I was playing, and of my own lonely situation.”
Shortly before Huston began ”The Grifters,” her romantic relationship with Nicholson was shattered by the news that he was having a baby with another woman. Huston found out right after completing Paul Mazursky`s
”Enemies: A Love Story,” in which she played Tamara, a concentration camp survivor who arrives in Brooklyn to find her husband remarried and having a child with another woman.
Powerful men, she`d long ago learned, have powerful urges. As a child living on a 110-acre estate in Galway, Ireland, Huston became aware that her parents were not exactly Romeo and Juliet. Her mother, Ricki Soma Huston, a former ballerina, was John Huston`s fourth wife. Anjelica`s parents separated when she was 11; her mother died in a car crash when Huston was still in her teens. By then, she`d learned that during her parent`s marriage, her father had had a son, director Danny Huston, by another woman.
”I don`t know what inspires men to be faithful, or infidel,” says Huston with a sober shrug. ”I certainly don`t go looking for an unfaithful man. For some reason, it seems to be something that some men think is macho, powerful, free, uncaring, masculine. In my opinion, it`s sort of a lousy thing for a man to be lauded for.”
Presumably, the issue of fidelity came up at some point during her long romance with Nicholson, perhaps after he was quoted saying that he is not by nature monogamous. Huston and Nicholson played lovers in John Huston`s
”Prizzi`s Honor.” (”Yeah, right here, on the oriental, with all the lights on,” was one of her particularly memorable lines.)
In the film, the romance between Huston`s Maerose and Nicholson`s Charlie had run aground before their wedding day, a fact that left Maerose estranged from her prideful mobster father until Charlie, a hit man, married another woman. By film`s end, Charlie is on the telephone asking Maerose to dinner. His wife, he says, won`t be around anymore.
”Holy cow, Charlie,” exclaims Maerose, ”where do you want to meet?”
”We had to shoot that scene a few times,” recalls Huston, ”and everytime he said, `It`s okay, she won`t be back,` I got this incredible gaiety about me, and the hairs on my arms stood up.”
Huston won an Academy Award for her performance in ”Prizzi`s Honor.”
She remained dry-eyed as she accepted her Oscar. In the audience, two men in her life cried.
After years of hustling to transcend doubts inspired by her formidable connections-she`s also the granddaughter of actor Walter Huston, whom she figures she`s seen in her father`s ”The Treasure of Sierra Madre” 20 or 30 times-Huston was finally in demand for herself. Poetically enough, she brought her hard-won renown to the film that would be her father`s cinematic farewell, an elegiac rendering of a James Joyce short story scripted by her brother Tony: ”The Dead.”
Huston played Greta Connoroy, a stately woman married to a most honorable gentleman, but haunted by the long-ago death of a boy she loved who loved her even more. Huston plays the broken heart in a tale that is both about the social rupture of Ireland and the similar fissures in an adult`s concept of romantic love.
In one mesmerizing scene, John Huston, who was himself clearly edging toward death, let the camera linger on his daughter. Framed by a stained-glass window, Anjelica Huston stood mournfully transfixed by the doleful strains of an Irish ballad, ”The Lass of Aughrim.” To project such memorable melancholy, Huston has said, all she had to do was ”just look at my father and think of Ireland.”
In moments like those, Huston seems wise beyond her years. ”People are compounded of many things,” she says, ”and women more things than most.”
The women in Huston`s portfolio, from the venal sorceress in Nicolas Roeg`s
”The Witches” to the unglued mistress in Woody Allen`s ”Crimes and Misdemeanors,” are not the girls next door. ”I guess I`m just naturally threatening,” she figures. ”I know I don`t fit many people`s ideal of the sweet, American woman.”
That makes her a natural as Morticia (opposite Raul Julia`s Gomez) in the upcoming movie version of ”The Addams Family.” Huston says she`s looking forward to playing something ”cool and ghostly.”
To Frears, Huston is ”a very strong woman who can look at terrible things with strength and grace.” Huston sees herself as ”a woman whose beauty doesn`t necessarily dictate an evenness in personality. The women I play don`t turn to crucifixes and garlic for protection. My physicality lends itself to a woman who doesn`t go down without a fight.”
When she`d rather lick her wounds, Huston packs her dog Minnie into the car and flees her Los Angeles home for a farm in the foothills of the Sequoia Mountains. There she rides horses, paints ”free-form frescos” and shrugs off her role as the torchbearer of a Hollywood dynasty.
Huston is asked if she has read Lawrence Grobel`s recent book on her famous family, ”The Hustons.” ”I didn`t read it,” she replies, ”because I lived it.”
