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John Huston
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John Marcellus Huston (August 5 1906 – August 28 1987) was an American film director and actor. He was known for directing the films, The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The African Queen (1951), The Misfits (1960), and The Man Who Would Be King (1975). He was the son of actor Walter Huston and the father of actress Anjelica Huston and actor Danny Huston.
on (pronounced "Hew'-stun", like the city Houston) was born in Nevada, Missouri, the son of the Canadian-born actor, Walter Huston, and Rhea Gore, a sports reporter; he was of Scots-Irish descent on his father's side, his ancestral surname was Houston, and English and Welsh on his mother's.
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Encyclopedia
John Marcellus Huston (August 5 1906 – August 28 1987) was an American film director and actor. He was known for directing the films, The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The African Queen (1951), The Misfits (1960), and The Man Who Would Be King (1975). He was the son of actor Walter Huston and the father of actress Anjelica Huston and actor Danny Huston.
Biography
Early life
Huston (pronounced "Hew'-stun", like the city Houston) was born in Nevada, Missouri, the son of the Canadian-born actor, Walter Huston, and Rhea Gore, a sports reporter; he was of Scots-Irish descent on his father's side, his ancestral surname was Houston, and English and Welsh on his mother's. Huston was raised by his maternal grandparents, Adelia Richardson and John Marcellus Gore.
As a ten year old he was stricken by a serious illness which left him all but bedridden for several years. On his recuperation, this acted as the spur to pursue a full life, both intellectually and physically.
Career
Huston began his film career as a screenwriter and made films mainly adapted from books or plays. The six-foot-two-inch, brown-eyed director also acted in a number of films, with distinction in Otto Preminger's The Cardinal for which he was nominated for the Academy award for Best Supporting Actor and in Roman Polanski's Chinatown as the film's central heavy against Jack Nicholson.
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." However Gable died three weeks after the end of filming from a massive heart attack while Huston went on to live for twenty-six more years.
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).
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.
Personal life
Huston, an Episcopalian, was married five times, to:
- Dorothy Harvey - This, his first marriage, lasted 7 years: Dorothy and John were divorced in 1933.
- 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. 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 bisexual British MP Ronald Tree, and decided to marry him instead. Huston was heart broken, and after an affair with the fashion designer and writer Pauline Fairfax Potter, married again.
- Evelyn Keyes - The Hustons adopted a son Pablo (from Mexico); (his affair with Fairfax Potter continued during the marriage).
- 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, 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.
- 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 (by Zoe Sallis).
Among his friends were Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway. According to a documentary film about Huston's life, 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 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 In 1982 he created the label for Château Mouton Rothschild.
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
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) NarratorMomo (1986, dir: Johannes Schaaf)
External links
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