“Not a happy journey”: The “incredibly corny” 1969 movie Anjelica Huston wants deleted from history
There was a tremendous amount of expectations placed on the daughter of Academy-Award winner John Huston.
The recent scrutiny regarding nepo babies who have found themselves in positions of power based on their last names is hardly a new phenomenon. Hollywood is filled with legendary families, in which many relatives choose to go into the same line of work.
While this does mean that they have an inherent degree of privilege that comes with being an established name, it doesn’t mean that they haven’t also earned the right to do great work. Using the strictest definition, brilliant actors such as Jeff Bridges, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ben Stiller, Carrie Fisher, Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, Robert Downey Jr, and Uma Thurman could all be considered to be nepo babies.
There aren’t many filmmakers in history who are as respected as John Huston, the first actor to ever win the Academy Award for ‘Best Director’ when Oscar voters were blown away with his work on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Huston’s career evolved over the next few decades as he made many different types of films within various genres, and 1969 saw him trying his hand at a classical historical drama with A Walk With Love and Death, which starred his daughter, Anjelica Huston. Although she had expressed only mild interest in acting, her father pushed for her to be in the film.
“The main reason for that was because Franco Zeffirelli was casting a wide net for a Juliet for his Romeo, and there was a school search that was going on,” she recalled, “He expressed some interest in me, and his producer, Dyson Lovell, had called me back a couple of times to see me, and I was pretty excited about that.”
However, she explained, since her father saw her enthusiasm and desire to be an actor, and the fact that he was also courting a three-picture deal with Fox, “the first of which was Sinful Davey and the second was A Walk with Love and Death… He was doing me this great favour”.
Huston said she quickly felt out of depth when negotiations for the project started amping up with her father, adding, “He wrote a letter to Zeffirelli to say that I wouldn’t be doing Juliet, which infuriated me, and that instead I would be working with him. I wasn’t crazy about the part. I was a big snob at the time. I felt that the script was a bit saccharine, and my character was the daughter of a nobleman, and a young student, played by Assaf Dayan, son of Moshe Dayan, was travelling the land in 15th-century France, looking for the sea. This struck me as being incredibly corny.”
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Huston’s work on the film ended up becoming even more disastrous once it began shooting, as it coincided with an actual student revolution in France.
She explained that due to the students protesting on the Left Bank, she couldn’t leave Paris and was stuck in a hotel room for four days, without even a hairbrush, which left her angry and distraught. After she was able to reach London, there was no way she could have gotten out of filming, and eventually, the father-daughter duo made the film happen, but the overall experience was less than ideal.
While A Walk With Love and Death was not the way that anyone would want to start their acting career, Huston managed to make amends with her father. He later directed her in Prizzi’s Honor, which won her the Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’, solidifying her career.
