Anjelica's clouds with gold lining

10 April 2012

It's a striking image; Anjelica Huston waiting alone, entirely in black in the back room of an empty restaurant lit by a log fire. Oh yes. Typically, epically gothic. I am 30 minutes late. She could raise her eyebrow like a dominatrix whip or she could look at me with those surrendered eyes and be concerned for my anxiety over my lateness, for my flustered state.

It could go either way. She's known for extremes of being rigorously hard edged or a pool of vulnerability ready for empathy.

Fortunately for me, I feel not the whip, but the warm cashmereness of her sweater in "Hello!" We are meeting ostensibly to talk about her role of Fanny Assingham in The Golden Bowl, a character whom she plays somewhat against the gothic scary type, a character whose well-meaning meddlesome-ness has a pivotal and tragic role, one of these people who is strangely ambiguous, doesn't mean to get in the way, but does. "She couldn't be vindictive. She just wants to make everyone safe and everything nice," she says very soothingly.

Huston is a woman who has, of course, known incredible levels of love, lust, pain, betrayal. If you're looking in the least bit forlorn, she warms to it, instantly wants to help you. If you've suffered something, you can bet she's suffered it with bells on.

She lost her mother, a dancer called Riki Soma, in a car crash when she was just 17. Riki was the fourth wife and not the last of the hugely talented, hugely charismatic film director John Huston. "A prolific, serious womaniser," Anjelica calls him.

Anjelica was born while her father was away directing African Queen. They moved to Ireland when she was a child to a grand house in County Galway. Anjelica, her brother and mother lived in a small house down the driveway and daddy Huston lived in the big house, but only in between film shoots.

Growing up, she admired him hugely. When he came home it was always with beautiful things and famous actors, and later on, when she worked with him and became Oscar-winning Mafia babe Mae Rose in Prizzi's Honor, she watched him partly in awe and in part gratification, waiting for that nod or wink, minimal praise that brought maximum joy.

Having the largely absent, but hugely brilliant father set the tone of her life, it's no surprise that her long-time lover for 16 years was the hugely talented, largely absent Jack Nicholson, famous for always looking sly and lusty, famous for being hopeless because he loved women. They finally broke up in 1990, after he got a waitress, Rebecca Broussard, pregnant.

Huston is now married to sculptor Robert Graham and has been for the past eight years. "I am happy now," she says. "But I go through moods. I am still attracted to the things I can't have, but I remind myself that this is not so much about getting a broken heart but about getting a broken ego.

"The two can easily be confused, but it's much easier to deal with if you tell yourself it's just your ego that was broken and simply the person didn't recognise you for the wonderful person you are and let you go. It doesn't have that same depth of soul, does it, and therefore it doesn't have that same impact."

We order fish and cous-cous and wine. Very gratifying to see a person drinking in LA at lunch-time, even if she's not the same reckless person that she used to be.

But she is in no way self-destructive. "I think a little humiliation goes a long way. The visuals of being rejected is hard to accept. If you have to force somebody's hand, it's not worth it. I think, in the end, we're meant to be with who we're meant to be with."

This has not been a conclusion that's been easy to form. She might have married Jack many times, but the timing was always wrong. It was the humiliation of getting the other woman pregnant that separated them. Resonant perhaps of when her father's marriage to her mother finally snapped upon her realising a mistress was pregnant, and ultimately just too loaded with painful irony. Huston had been trying to get pregnant for years, going through all that excruciating fertility testing regime, and now someone else had done it for her.

She doesn't find it hard to talk about Jack any more, and thinks that she was as responsible as him for the break-up because she wasn't around, but when the die was cast for the two of them, she was heartbroken. "I felt like there was a death in the family. I'd been through that with my mother and this was as bad as either. There was terrible abandonment, terrible loneliness. Somehow he symbolised a whole life for me. He was my family.

"All of a sudden, over the course of one day, you don't know what somebody eats for breakfast. You know nothing about them because they're no longer yours. They're no longer dedicated to you in any way." Her career, as both actress and director, has completely blossomed, though, since their break-up.

OF Nicholson's attitude to her now, she says: "He likes me. I know he cares about me. We never succumbed to any unpleasantness to protect ourselves. Even though we were in extreme pain, we never did any of that. We just thought, shit happens. Who knows when passion begins and ends and how love comes and goes and how one person doesn't feel it anymore for the other?" She's referring back to the Golden Bowl, and its sad theme of unrequitedness. But she's not sad herself.

After another glass of wine, we're discussing how, if love isn't about ego, it's about a chemical reaction. "It must be. Why would it be anything other than chemical that suddenly you meet somebody and it generates physical changes. It makes your heart beat faster, your blood rise. What exactly is that? I had a capacity to fall in love at the drop of a hat for no reason other than my character in a movie might be besotted."

And what about now? She shrugs. She says she is extremely happy with her husband. "He knows me well enough. He doesn't miss anything. He sees it all. He may not like it, but he sees it and that's what attracted me to him. He is pragmatic and non-judgmental and completely unthreatened.

"I couldn't be married to a man who had ideas of what I should do and where I should go. I like him to guide me, but not tell me what to do." Just as well.

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