John Huston

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John Marcellus Huston (August 5, 1906 – August 28, 1987), American film director and actor.

1 Biography
2 Filmography
- 2.1 As director
- 2.2 As an actor
3 External links

Biography

He was born in Nevada, Missouri, the son of the Canadian-born actor, Walter Huston. He 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.

In 1941, Huston was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay for The Maltese Falcon and again in 1948 for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He was also an accomplished painter who created the 1982 label for Château Mouton Rothschild.

Huston was married to (1) Dorothy Harvey, (2) Lesley Black, (3) Evelyn Keyes, (4) Enrica Soma, and (5) Celeste Shane. All but the marriage to Soma, who died, ended in divorce. Among his children are the director Danny Huston and the actress Anjelica Huston. Among his friends were Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway.

Huston also directed The Misfits (film) 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.

He became an Irish citizen (although it is not clear if he had to relinquish his U.S. citizenship), and his daughter Anjelica attended school in Ireland for a number of years.

John Huston 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.

In the 1970s, he was a frequent actor in Italian films.

He died from emphysema on August 28, 1987, at the age of 81.

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

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