Having been around Hollywood her whole life, Anjelica Huston knows how the system works, and how even as a sultry 53-year-old actress it doesn't work in her favor. "In most movies, you either get to be the girlfriend or the sex symbol or the adjunct," she says disdainfully, sitting in a downtown Manhattan hotel before a premiere event for her latest film, The Life Aquatic. "And most starring roles for women don't really take them on much of an adventure."
This latest role, however, is the kind of journey that's worth her time. She's just a supporting player in a large ensemble, but as the other characters repeat over and over, her Eleanor Zissou is "the brains of the operation." Filming took her to the open seas off the coast of Italy with Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum and Owen Wilson for a movie about a washed-up Jacques Cousteau type who goes chasing after a shark who ate his friend. "If you read this script and didn't know who was in charge, you'd question it," says Murray, who was sold after director Wes Anderson read him the script on a speedboat while he was sunbathing. "You have to have faith in who you're with."
If it weren't for directors such as the 35-year-old Anderson, who has earned Huston's respect like the masters she's worked with, including Woody Allen, Paul Mazursky, Steven Frears and her father, John Huston, she'd do a few cameos a year and stick to directing projects. But Anderson is an anomaly of his generation, in that he is not the type of young male director who writes parts in his movies for the beautiful women of his fantasies. Instead, he creates characters based on his mother, and then he gets Huston, who is just barely old enough to fit the part, to play them.
"I've never met his mother, but I have a feeling she's strong," says Huston, who also starred, along with Murray and Wilson, in Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. "Wes understands the dilemma, that when women become too forceful, they get accused of being masculine. If they state their opinions, or if they assert themselves, they won't be thought of as lovable or feminine. We all want to be loved by our daddies ‑- it's a pattern we develop."
Huston's daddy, who died 17 years ago, got to see his daughter win an Oscar for Prizzi's Honor, which he directed, but no doubt he would be even prouder of the way she's maintained her career and asserted herself since then, not just as an actress, but also as a director.
"Directing gives me something new to think about," Huston says. "I enjoy it a lot. I like working with actors. I like to have command of the way a movie's going to look."
So far, she has headed three projects, each unabashedly about strong women and the problems they face. "They're kind of about me," she says.
Her first, Bastard Out of Carolina, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996, but afterward Ted Turner, who funded the project, found the subject matter about molestation too brutal and wouldn't air the film. Huston then put her own star power on the line as the title character of Agnes Browne three years later. This sweet film about a poor Irish woman got decent reviews, but did much better in the United Kingdom than it did in America.
Her next project, a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie for TV, will star Rosie O'Donnell as a mentally challenged woman who rides the bus all day.
"The trouble always with female-driven movies is getting strong men to act in them," Huston says. "Men are apt to want to star in movies. It's amazing how much resistance you come across with them wanting to be the center of the movie."
Huston doesn't really get that. She's content to play supporting roles in male-dominated pictures as long as the movies are good. "My career has mostly survived on supporting roles ‑- great supporting roles ‑- but those are the ones that interest me," she says. "I don't find myself attracted to centerpiece roles that don't necessarily have a lot to say."
