John Huston

John Huston
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Birth name:	John Marcellus Huston
Date of birth:	August 5 1906(1906-08-05)
Birth location:	Nevada, Missouri, USA
Date of death:	August 28 1987 (aged 81)
Death location:	Middletown, Rhode Island, USA
Academy Awards:	Best Director 1948 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Best Adapted Screenplay 1948 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Spouse:	Dorothy Harvey (1925-1926) Lesley Black (1937-1945) Evelyn Keyes (1946-1950) Ricki Soma (1950-1969) Celeste Shane (1972-1977)

John Marcellus Huston (August 5, 1906 – August 28, 1987) was an American film director and actor. He was known for directing several classic films, The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, the The African Queen, and Prizzi's Honor (for which his daughter, Anjelica, won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress ). He won Best Director and Best Writing Academy Awards (Oscars) for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and was nominated for the Oscar at least thirteen additional times.

Huston also acted in many other movies, sometimes memorably in good films and other times in films best described as forgettable. In addition to his genius as director, actor, and writer, he was known for drinking, gambling, womanizing, and generally being "an ecccentric rebel of epic proportions," as one commentator put it. His career as one of the reigning luminaries of Hollywood lasted for five decades.

Biography

Early life

Huston was born in Nevada, Missouri, the son of the Canadian-born actor, Walter Huston (also an Academy Award winner), and Rhea Gore, a reporter who traveled around the country looking for stories. John was of Scottish and Irish descent on his father's side. An old story claims that the small town of his birth was won by John's grandfather in a poker game.

John was the only child of the couple, and he began performing on stage with his vaudevillian father at age 3. When he was 7 his parents divorced, and after that he took turns traveling around the vaudeville circuit with his father, and the country with his mother on reporting excursions. He was a frail and sickly child, and was once placed in a sanitarium due to both an enlarged heart and kidney ailment. He recovered and quit school at age 14 to become a full-fledged boxer. Eventually he won the Amateur Lightweight Boxing Championship of California, winning 22 of 25 bouts. His trademark broken nose resulted from his boxing.

Career

At age 18 John married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy Harvey. He also made his first professional stage appearance in a leading role off-Broadway entitled "The Triumph of the Egg." That same year, in April 1925, he made his Broadway debut with "Ruint." The following November he was in another Broadway show "Adam Solitaire." He quickly grew restless both his marriage and acting and left both for a sojourn to Mexico where he became an expert horseman and cavalry officer, writing plays on the side. Later he returned to America and attempted reporting work for newspapers and magazines by submitting short stories. At one point mogul Samuel Goldwyn Jr. even hired him as a screenwriter, and he even appeared in a few unbilled film roles. But he grew restless again and by 1932 left for London and Paris where he studied painting and sketching.

He returned to America in 1933 and played the title role in a production of "Abraham Lincoln," only a few years after his father Walter had played the part on film for D.W. Griffith. To develop his writing skills John began collaborating on some scripts for Warner Brothers. Warners was impressed with his talents and signed him on as both screenwriter and director for the movie to be made of the Dashiell Hammett mystery The Maltese Falcon (1941). Theat movie classic made a superstar out of Humphrey Bogart and is still considered by many critics and filmgoers to be one ot the greatest detective films ever made.

During this time Huston also wrote and staged a couple of Broadway plays. He also directed bad-girl Bette Davis and good girl Olivia de Havilland in the film melodrama In This Our Life (1942), and three of his "Falcon" stars (Bogart, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet) in the romantic war picture Across the Pacific (1942).

During WWII John served as a Signal Corps lieutenant. He went on to direct some film documentaries for the U.S. government, including Let There Be Light (1946), narrated by his father Walter. In 1946 Huston directed Jean-Paul Sartre's experimental play "No Exit" on Broadway. The show ran less than a month and failed at the box-office, but did receive the New York Drama Critics Award as "best foreign play."

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.

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John Huston's Legacy

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). Huston also directed The Misfits (1960) with an all-star cast including Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach. Famously, 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." Ironically, and tragically, 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 a frequent actor in Italian films, but continued acting until the age of 80 (Momo, 1986), one year before he passed away.

Huston's last film was The Dead (1988), based on what many regard as James Joyce's best short story. Huston's son Tony wrote the script and his daughter Anjelica played one of the parts—the wife. The film is an understated masterpiece, based on a story about a Christmas party in Dublin, and then a scene in a hotel room of a husband and wife in which the wife confesses that she had a young boyfriend many years ago when he was 17 and that this boy died then.now is falling outside the hotel window coverin gall of Ireland, including the boy's grave. This film shows Huston at the height of his power at the end of his life, similar to the way Luis Buñuel and Jear Renoir held the height of their powers and made great movies at the end of their lives.

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).

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
• 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 vigourously that they broke a friends bed. When her husband returned before the end of the Second World War, Huston returned 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:

• Evelyn Keyes - during which his affair with Fairfax Potter continued
• Enrica Soma - daughter Anjelica Huston, son attorney Walter Antony "Tony" Huston
• Celeste Shane.

All but the marriage to Soma, who died, ended in divorce. Among his children are the director Danny Huston (by Zoe Sallis) and the actress Anjelica Huston (by Enrica Soma) and attorney Walter Antony "Tony" Huston (also by Enrica Soma).

Among his friends were Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway.

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, between Loughrea and 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 created the 1982 label for Château Mouton Rothschild.

He died from emphysema on August 28, 1987 in Middletown, Rhode Island, at the age of 81. 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.

John Huston's Legacy

Hollywood glory came to him again in association with Bogart and Warner Brothers'. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), a classic tale of gold, greed and man's inhumanity to man set in Mexico, won John Oscars for both director and screenplay and his father nabbed the "Best Supporting Actor" trophy. John can be glimpsed at the beginning of the movie in a cameo playing a tourist, but he wouldn't act again on film for a decade and a half. With the momentum in his favor, John hung around in Hollywood this time to write and/or direct some of the finest American cinema made including Key Largo (1948) and The African Queen (1951) (both with Bogart), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951) and Moulin Rouge (1952). Later films, including Moby Dick (1956), The Unforgiven (1960), The Misfits (1961), Freud (1962), The Night of the Iguana (1964) and The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966) were, for the most part, well-regarded but certainly not close to the level of his earlier revered work. He also experimented behind-the-camera with colour effects and approached topics that most others would not even broach, including homosexuality and psychoanalysis.

An ardent supporter of human rights, he, along with director William Wyler and others, dared to form the Committee for the First Amendment in 1947, which strove to undermine the House Un-American Activities Committee. Disgusted by the Hollywood blacklisting that was killing the careers of many talented folk, he moved to St. Clerans in Ireland and became a citizen there along with his fourth wife, ballet dancer Enrica (Ricki) Soma. The couple had two children, including daughter Anjelica Huston who went on to have a bravura Hollywood career of her own. Huston and his third wife split after a son (director Danny Huston) was born to another actress in 1962. They did not divorce, however, and remained estranged until her sudden death in 1969 in a car accident. John subsequently adopted his late wife's child from another union. The ever-impulsive Huston would move yet again to Mexico where he married (1972) and divorced (1977) his fifth and final wife, Celeste Shane.

Huston returned to acting auspiciously with a major role in Otto Preminger's epic film The Cardinal (1963) for which Huston received an Oscar nomination at age 57. From that time forward, he would be glimpsed here and there in a number of colorful, baggy-eyed character roles in both good and bad (some positively abysmal) films that, at the very least, helped finance his passion projects. The former list included outstanding roles in Chinatown (1974) and The Wind and the Lion (1975), while the latter comprised of hammy parts in such awful drek as Candy (1968) and Myra Breckinridge (1970).

Directing daughter Angelica in her inauspicious movie debut, the thoroughly mediocre A Walk with Love and Death (1969), John made up for it 15 years later by directing her to Oscar glory in the mob tale Prizzi's Honor (1985). In the 1970s Huston resurged as a director of quality films with Fat City (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Wise Blood (1979). He ended his career on a high note with Under the Volcano (1984), the afore-mentioned Prizzi's Honor (1985) and The Dead (1987). His only certifiable misfire during that era was the elephantine musical version of Annie (1982).

Huston lived the macho, outdoors life, unencumbered by convention or restrictions, and is often compared in style or flamboyancy to an Ernest Hemingway or Orson Welles. He was, in fact, the source of inspiration for Clint Eastwood in the helming of the film White Hunter Black Heart (1990) which chronicled the making of "The African Queen." Illness robbed Huston of a good portion of his twilight years with chronic emphysema the main culprit. As always, however, he continued to work tirelessly while hooked up to an oxygen machine if need be. At the end, the living legend was shooting an acting cameo in the film Mr. North (1988) for his son Danny, making his directorial bow at the time. John became seriously ill with pneumonia and died while on location at the age of 81. This maverick of a man's man who was once called "the eccentric's eccentric" by Paul Newman, left an incredibly rich legacy of work to be enjoyed by film lovers for centuries to come.

Filmography

Statue of John Huston, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

As director

• The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• In This Our Life (1942)
• Across the Pacific (1942)
• Report from the Aleutians (1943)
• The Battle of San Pietro (1945)
• Let There Be Light (1946)
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
• Key Largo (1948)
• We Were Strangers (1949)
• The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
• The Red Badge of Courage (1951)
• The African Queen (1951)
• Moulin Rouge (1953)
• Beat the Devil (1953)
• Moby Dick (1956)
• Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957)
• The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958)
• The Roots of Heaven (1958)
• The Unforgiven (1960)
• The Misfits (1960)
• Freud the Secret Passion (1962)
• The List of Adrian Messenger (1963)
• The Night of the Iguana (1964)
• The Bible: In The Beginning (1966)
• Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)
• Casino Royale (1967)
• Sinful Davey (1969)
• A Walk with Love and Death (1969)
• The Kremlin Letter (1970)
• Fat City (1972)
• The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)
• The Mackintosh Man (1973)
• The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
• Wise Blood (1979)
• Phobia (1980)
• Escape to Victory (1981)
• Annie (1982)
• Under the Volcano (1984)
• Prizzi's Honor (1985)
• The Dead (1987)

As screenwriter

• Three Strangers (1946)

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)*Winters Kill (1979,dir:((Willam 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)
• Momo (1986, dir: Johannes Schaaf)

External links

• They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?
• John Huston at the Internet Movie Database
• John Huston's Gravesite

Preceded by: Elia Kazan for Gentleman's Agreement	Academy Award for Best Director 1948 for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre	Succeeded by: Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives
Preceded by: Carol Burnett, Michael Caine, Charlton Heston, and Rock Hudson 45th Academy Awards	Oscars host 46th Academy Awards (with David Niven, Burt Reynolds, and Diana Ross)	Succeeded by: Sammy Davis, Jr., Bob Hope, Shirley MacLaine, and Frank Sinatra 47th Academy Awards

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