A Story Lately Told
Anjelica Huston describes her charmed upbringing in Ireland, her adolescent years in London, and her coming of age as a model and embryonic actor in New York, all written with an exuberant love of language and detail.
Anjelica Huston describes her charmed upbringing in Ireland, her adolescent years in London, and her coming-of-age as a model and embryonic actor in New York, all written with an exuberant love of language and detail.
Huston was up on an Irish estate where her father brought his assortment of exceptional acquaintances, from Carson McCullers and John Steinbeck to Peter O'Toole and Marlon Brando, in between movies. She was taught by tutors and nuns and fearless on a horse. Anjelica and her brother paid their father a visit every morning as he ate his breakfast in bed. "What's new?" he'd inquire. Anjelica recalls seeing him the night before. "I didn't have anything to say." As a result, she began to tell stories.
Huston meets the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac in London, where she lives with her mother and brother in the early 1960s after her parents divorce. In Hamlet, she is the understudy for Marianne Faithfull. When her mother dies in a car accident, she is distraught. She is seventeen, striking, precocious, but yet young and fragile.
She arrives to New York a few months later, falls in love with the much older, talented but troubled photographer Bob Richardson, and starts modelling. She navigates a tumultuous relationship and the dynamic cultural hub of New York in the 1970s while living at the Chelsea Hotel and working with Richard Avedon and other photographers.
A Story Recently Told comes to a close as Huston begins her career in Hollywood. Watch Me, the second instalment of her journey, begins in Los Angeles in 1973 and will be released in the fall of 2014. Huston's book is enthralling and well written, and it is a treasure.
