Hollywood: wonderfully unpredictable

The party is over, the last guests are leaving. Gretta, too, slowly descends the stairs. Shortly after the landing, she pauses and turns her gaze upwards. A song that sounds pulls you back into the past, into your youth. Time stands still …

It’s “The Lass of Aughrim,” an old Irish tune. It’s about a love that cannot be fulfilled. A boy Gretta loved died at seventeen. The reactions on her face are barely noticeable, a slight raising of the eyebrows, a vague shake of the head. Anjelica Huston is Gretta in “The Dead”, 1987, her father John’s last film, after James Joyce. The moment on the stairs stretches, pure cinema, so much stronger than any melodramatic turbulence.

Anjelica Huston was born on July 8, 1951, while John was filming “African Queen”. She was on a film set for the 1956 film adaptation of “Moby Dick”. She made her first film at seventeen, directed by John , “A Walk with Love and Death”. Franco Zeffirelli also had an eye on her back then, wanted her as Julia in his Shakespeare film. The father categorically refused him, Anjelica was angry, her father’s film seemed old-fashioned to her. Later, John gave her the role of Maerose, the vulgar mafia princess in “Prizzi’s Honor”, at the side of Jack Nicholson, with whom she was in a relationship for many years. “The director is her father, the star is her lover, and she can’t act,” was blasphemed. Then she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the third member of the Huston family to receive that award, after Father John and Grandfather Walter.

The movement of her life: from nature girl agility to pose

She spent her childhood in Ireland, on the country estate that John bought in the fifties, and she did many things that her father expected in his robustness, for example riding the side saddle. At some point she had enough of it and started working as a model, her mother Enrica Soma, a ballerina, knew Richard Avedon, who photographed her for Vogue, Anjelica worked (and lived) with Bob Richardson, was pictured by David Bailey or Helmut Newton. This is the move of her life, from the nature girl agility, as the father liked her, to the pose.

“Be careful, honey, you’re out-irishing the Irish,” warned John at “The Dead”. He had warned them similarly at Prizzi, with the Italians. I always start powerfully, she says, and then drive back. She was able to break away from a dominant father and then from a moody lover (who had a child with another). This is what makes the mothers so pleasantly unpredictable, who she embodies in three films for Wes Anderson, most recently in “The Darjeeling Limited”. She was an Irish mother in “Agnes Browne” (which she directed herself), raising seven children. A direct path then leads to Morticia Addams, the matriarch of the legendary family. And to the absolute mother who Grand High Witch in “The Witches” by Nicolas Roeg.

The subtlety of the pose: Anjelica Huston is beautifully Madonna-like as Gretta, the dark dress, the white headscarf loosely draped, the bright, colorful glass window behind her. She will be seventy on Thursday.