Anjelica Huston on Towards Zero, fleeing the LA fires and childhood memories of Marlon Brando

"Rather like my bed, this was a role that was made for me," she says, and she isn’t wrong. It’s been 40 years since she stepped into the shoes of a mobster moll for her Oscar-winning turn in Prizzi’s Honor, a role that she still singles out as a "career highlight".

Since then, the actor’s best-bits montage has featured a malignant stepmother in Ever After: a Cinderella Story, a homicidal confidence trickster in Grifters, Morticia Addams in The Addams Family films and, more recently, a murderous "director" in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum.

If Huston, 73, is no less exquisitely formidable in Towards Zero, it ought to be added that the woman you get in person is almost the polar opposite. Twenty minutes into our conversation, when I fumble on one of my questions, she suddenly morphs into an encouraging aunt: "You’re doing very well!" she pipes supportively.

It’s the first time she’s "done" Agatha Christie. It felt, she says, like both "a rite of passage and a privilege, because [Christie] wrote for women in a way that most writers don’t. Which means that almost a century later, it’s impossible for us to watch these events unfold and not notice how little things have changed."

For "events", read the emotional toll exacted upon the women in the life of tennis star Nevile Strange (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who heads off to spend the summer at the country manor of his bedroom-bound great aunt Lady Tressilian, accompanied by his ex-wife Audrey (Ella Lily Hyland) and his new wife Kay (Mimi Keene). "Shame is an emotion that men seem too keen to deflect onto women," says Huston. She’s talking about poor Kay and Audrey, left hanging by a man who clearly enjoys the arrangement.

However, from the remove of her upstairs bedroom, Huston would have had plenty of time to note the parallels between Strange and her ex-partner, and Prizzi’s Honor co-star, Jack Nicholson, whose philandering she reluctantly tolerated until he arranged a dinner date in order to tell her that another actress, Rebecca Broussard, was pregnant with his child.

In fact, gazing at the Somerset countryside from her bed, "over the green fields and old trees outside", Huston says her mind would stretch much further back to earlier, simpler times. Suddenly, she was six again, catapulted to the years her father, the director John Huston and her mother, socialite and model Enrica Soma, moved the family to a country house in rural Ireland. "In many ways, it wasn’t so different to shooting a period drama," she says. "Long periods of very little punctuated by intense activity." Somewhat lower stakes, though? "Well, day-to-day life was boring, but visitors from abroad were always fascinating."

The ensuing pause feels like an incitement to probe further. "Like who? Oh, you know. Marlon Brando, John Steinbeck…" She was only six when Brando rocked up, too young to know exactly what he did, but old enough to "remember looking up quizzically at him and thinking, ‘Hmm… this is Marlon Brando.’ Not that I even knew what Marlon Brando should look like. He was very nice to me. He gave me a tortoiseshell ring and spent a little time with me. I remember appreciating him, but not finding him particularly beautiful."

Not like the author of Of Mice and Men, who stayed for Christmas and brought his own outfit. "John Steinbeck played Santa Claus. He didn’t have a sack of presents, but he got into it. I remember that. And he couldn’t have been nicer."

If Ireland elicits nostalgia, her ensuing years, packed off to London’s notoriously strict Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle school, left her feeling like a failure. So, when swinging London swung her way, she climbed aboard to see Jimi Hendrix at Earl’s Court:
"I watched him as I rode on a carousel that they’d set up in the main hall. I think that’s as close as I ever got to heaven."

But none of this brought her any closer to knowing what adult life had in store for her. When her father cast her, aged just 18, as the aristocratic Claudia in A Walk with Love and Death, her eagerness to please him prompted her to give it her best shot.

They would, of course, work together again on Prizzi’s Honor, but when A Walk with Love and Death emerged back in 1969, Huston’s performance was eviscerated by critics. Appearing on David Frost’s US talk show, just months after the death of her mother in a car accident, Huston took the extraordinary measure of issuing a public apology to her father.

Once again, the conversation turns to shame. Her boyfriend at the time was the photographer Bob Richardson, "who emphasised that I should feel shame, so I think I was somewhat parroting what he’d said to me."

If we seem to be dwelling on the past more than either of us had expected, she says that’s perfectly fine – it’s a luxury she frequently allows herself. The music she mainly listens to is, "the Stones and Laurel Canyon stuff"; her current read is the memoir of her friend, actor Griffin Dunne (An American Werewolf in London), whose star rose in parallel to her own.

She’s speaking from her ranch in the small Californian town of Three Rivers, having fled there from her home in LA two days previously. As the wildfires engulfed the city, she stayed until the last possible moment. Without a hint of drama, she reveals that "the fire had reached the house next door" before she packed a few of her most precious possessions and got in the car. What did she reach for first? "Well, my dogs, obviously. And then my photographs." Later, she was told that her house had been spared.

Gazing at the photos of her younger self among those she had grabbed, she struggled to understand why she was quite so hard on herself, even during her self-imposed exile from acting following A Walk with Love and Death, when she became a sought-after model.

"I know, right? I was a strange dichotomy of both sort of happy with myself, pleased with the way I looked, and yet also uncomfortable. But somehow it all came together." Perhaps it wasn’t just that "it all came together". Looking at the arc of her career and the roles she’s attracted, especially in the past couple of decades, you sense that it took the next generation of directors, writers and actors to really grasp the breadth of Huston’s range, increasingly going so far as creating parts with a view to her playing them.

Drew Barrymore herself went to the trouble of calling Huston up and love-bombing her into playing her wicked stepmother Baroness Rodmilla de Ghent in 1998’s Ever After. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson famously created the role of Etheline Tenenbaum for her, while in John Wick: Chapter 3, Keanu Reeves was rumoured to have pushed for her to be cast, later saying: "She’s a legend and to meet her and get a chance to act with her is something special."

None of which is surprising to Sam Yates, director of Towards Zero. My speculative message via Instagram prompts an almost instant response from Yates, who enthuses: "Anjelica was the only actor I had in my mind when I read Lady Tressilian in Towards Zero. Lady Tressilian is a woman who holds great secrets, and Anjelica brought with her mystery and a sense of fun that’s irresistible and felt just right for the role."

The other experience regrettably shared by Huston and Lady Tressilian is the fact that they have both had to deal with being widowed. Huston was happily married to sculptor Robert Graham for 16 years and, when she last spoke to Radio Times in 2012, in the wake of her fabulous turn as austerely bobbed theatre producer Eileen Rand in the musical drama series Smash, the shadow of their years together loomed large.

She joked that "since my life always imitates art", she had asked the show’s writer if she could give her "a lovely boyfriend".
So, has life imitated art? "Well, life is great, actually. And it will continue to be great as long as I can have my animals and do stuff like garden, or ride, or whatever my heart desires. As for a lovely boyfriend? Not so much! Not so much, but then you can’t have everything."

At this point, it feels salient to quote one of Huston’s own characters back at her. Repeating the words of Baroness Rodmilla de Ghent, I put it to her that nothing is final until you’re dead – and even then I’m sure God negotiates.

"I see what you did there," she laughs. "There’s some truth in that, though. When you’re young, you think you’re the author of your life, but really you’re just the main character. Sure, you feel free. But you don’t ultimately get to decide what happens next."

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Agatha Christie's Towards Zero premieres on BBC One and iPlayer on Sunday 2nd March 2025.

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