John Huston

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John Huston
Birth name	John Marcellus Huston
Born	August 5, 1906 Nevada, Missouri, USA
Died	August 28, 1987 Middletown, Rhode Island, USA
Years active	1929 - 1987
Spouse(s)	Celeste Shane (August 1972 - 1977) (divorced) Ricki Soma (March 1950 - 1969) (her death) 2 children Evelyn Keyes (July 23, 1946 - 1950) (divorced) 1 child Lesley Black (1937 - 1945) (divorced) Dorothy Harvey (1925 - 1926) (divorced)
Notable roles	Noah Cross in Chinatown (1974)
Academy Awards
Best Director 1948 Treasure of the Sierra Madre

John Marcellus Huston (August 5, 1906 – August 28, 1987) was an American film director and actor. He is known for directing several classic films, The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, and The African Queen.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Career 1.3 Academy Awards 1.4 Personal life 2 Filmography 2.1 As director 2.2 As a screenwriter 2.3 As an actor 3 External links

Biography

Early life

He was born in Nevada, Missouri, the son of the Canadian-born actor, Walter Huston, and Rhea Gore; he was of Scottish and Irish descent on his father's side. Huston was raised by his maternal grandparents, Adelia Richardson and John Marcellus Gore.

Career

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.

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 Night of the Iguana (1964). 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.

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.

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.

John 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,[1] 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; according to his third wife, Huston had an affair with the American fashion designer and writer Pauline Fairfax Potter in the 1940s. 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. He is interred in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California.

Filmography

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)
• Victory (1980)
• Annie (1982)
• Under the Volcano (1984)
• Prizzi's Honor (1985)
• The Dead (1987)

Preceded by Elia Kazan for Gentleman's Agreement	Academy Award for Best Director 1948 for 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

As a screenwriter

• Three Strangers (1946)

As an actor

This list 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)
• 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)

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).

External links

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

• John Huston's Gravesite