John Huston

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For other persons named John Huston, see John Huston (disambiguation).
John Huston

Born John Marcellus Huston
August 5, 1906(1906-08-05)
Nevada, Missouri, U.S.
Died August 28, 1987 (aged 81)
Middletown, Rhode Island, U.S.
Spouse(s) 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 Academy Award-winning film director and actor. He was known for directing several classic 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 director Danny Huston.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Huston 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[1], 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.

[edit] 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 icons Gable and Monroe. 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 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).

[edit] 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.

[edit] Personal life

Huston, an Episcopalian,[2] 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 vigorously, they broke a friend's bed.[3] 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 - son Pablo - adopted from Mexico. Affair with Fairfax Potter continued during the marriage;
  • Enrica Soma - daughter Anjelica Huston, son attorney Walter Antony "Tony" Huston;
  • Celeste Shane.

All but the marriage to Soma, who died, ended in divorce. In addition to his children with Soma, he also was 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[4] In 1982 he created the 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.[5]

Huston is interred in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California.

[edit] Filmography

Statue of John Huston, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
Statue of John Huston, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

[edit] As director

[edit] As screenwriter

[edit] As actor

Does not include films which he also directed

[edit] References

  1. ^ wc.rootsweb.com
  2. ^ The religion of director John Huston
  3. ^ Running Around in High Circles
  4. ^ [Art by Directors, Karl French, Granta 86, 2004, ISBN 0 90 314169 8
  5. ^ Running Around in High Circles

[edit] External links


Awards
Preceded by
Omar Shariff
for Lawrence of Arabia		 Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture
1964
for The Cardinal		 Succeeded by
Edmond O'Brien
for Seven Days in May
v • d • e
Academy Award for Best Director

John Ford (1941) · William Wyler (1942) · Michael Curtiz (1943) · Leo McCarey (1944) · Billy Wilder (1945) · William Wyler (1946) · Elia Kazan (1947) · John Huston (1948) · Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1949) · Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1950) · George Stevens (1951) · John Ford (1952) · Fred Zinnemann (1953) · Elia Kazan (1954) · Delbert Mann (1955) · George Stevens (1956) · David Lean (1957) · Vincente Minnelli (1958) · William Wyler (1959) · Billy Wilder (1960)

Complete List · (1927–1940) · (1941–1960) · (1961–1980) · (1981–2000) · (2001-present)
v • d • e
Hosts of the Academy Awards ceremonies

Bob Hope (1961) · Bob Hope (1962) · Frank Sinatra (1963) · Jack Lemmon (1964) · Bob Hope (1965) · Bob Hope (1966) · Bob Hope (1967) · Bob Hope (1968) · Helen Hayes / Alan King / Sammy Davis, Jr. / Jack Lemmon (1972) · Carol Burnett / Michael Caine / Charlton Heston / Rock Hudson (1973) · John Huston / Burt Reynolds / David Niven / Diana Ross (1974) · Sammy Davis, Jr. / Bob Hope / Shirley MacLaine / Frank Sinatra (1975) · Goldie Hawn / Gene Kelly / Walter Matthau / George Segal / Robert Shaw (1976) · Warren Beatty / Ellen Burstyn / Jane Fonda / Richard Pryor (1977) · Bob Hope (1978) · Johnny Carson (1979) · Johnny Carson (1980)
v • d • e
Films directed by John Huston
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
Persondata
NAME Huston, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Huston, John Marcellus
SHORT DESCRIPTION American film director and actor
DATE OF BIRTH August 5, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Nevada, Missouri, U.S.
DATE OF DEATH August 28, 1987
PLACE OF DEATH Middletown, Rhode Island, U.S.