By Sara Bright
Anjelica Huston does not whisper. She speaks with the measured authority of a woman who has spent seven decades commanding rooms, sets, and the undivided attention of audiences who know better than to look away. When she reveals, in a People magazine interview published in April 2025, that she privately battled cancer for six years – diagnosed in 2019, now four years “in the clear” – the disclosure lands not as a confession but as a declaration. She survived. She is proud. And she has no intention of stopping.
“I managed to survive it, and I’m proud of myself,” Huston told People. “It came as a big shock, but it made me conscious of what I shouldn’t do, of places I shouldn’t go. One of those places was taking life too seriously.”
The timing is significant. Huston’s cancer diagnosis came shortly after the release of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum in 2019, a film that grossed $326 million worldwide and reintroduced her to a generation of viewers who knew her primarily as Morticia Addams or the Grand High Witch. Rather than retreating, she spent the subsequent years filming voice work for Star Wars: The Bad Batch, reprising her John Wick role in Ballerina, and – most consequentially – delivering a performance as Lady Tressilian in the BBC’s three-part Agatha Christie adaptation Towards Zero that critics have described as among the finest of her career.
The Bedridden Matriarch Who Rules Everything
Lucy Mangan, writing in The Guardian, called Huston’s portrayal “magnificent,” noting that she plays Lady Tressilian “with all the power at her command.” The character, adapted from Christie’s 1944 novel by screenwriter Rachel Bennette and directed by Sam Yates, is a widow who has not left her bedroom in fifteen years, having watched her husband’s yacht sink in the Devon bay below her window. From her bed, she presides over a household of heirs, lawyers, and what she memorably terms “a brood of vipers.”
It is a role that requires Huston to do almost nothing physically and everything emotionally. “I loved playing from bed, it was great,” she told PEOPLE. “It was very relaxing and wonderfully undemanding. I’ve always liked bed. It’s one of my preferences, and now I’m convinced, absolutely. It’s almost a prerequisite.”
The humour is characteristic – dry, self-deprecating, never quite what it seems. But beneath the wit lies a serious artistic choice. Lady Tressilian is not a passive figure; she is a strategist, a woman who wields influence through proximity and patience rather than action. Director Sam Yates told Radio Times that “Anjelica was the only actor I had in my mind when I read Lady Tressilian. Lady Tressilian is a woman who holds great secrets, and Anjelica brought with her mystery and a sense of fun that’s irresistible.”
The physical restraint of the role, paradoxically, liberates Huston’s considerable expressive range. Her face – those sharp cheekbones, the imperious gaze inherited from a lineage of Huston patriarchs – does the work that lesser actors accomplish with monologues. Every imperious ring of the bedside bell communicates decades of authority. Every sceptical glance at the scheming relatives gathered at her Gull’s Point estate communicates contempt for pretence.
From St Clerans to the Oscar Stage
To understand why Huston’s late-career resurgence carries such weight, one must understand the terrain she has navigated. Born in Los Angeles to director John Huston and ballerina Enrica Soma, she spent her early childhood at St Clerans, the family’s 110-acre Georgian estate in Galway, Ireland. The house was a magnet for literary and cinematic royalty – John Steinbeck, Marlon Brando, Peter O’Toole all passed through – but the Huston men were largely absent. Her grandfather Walter had died shortly before her birth; her father spent years abroad on film sets.
Her mother’s death in a car accident in 1969, when Anjelica was seventeen, shattered the idyll. She decamped first to London, then New York, where she modelled for Richard Avedon and David Bailey and navigated the Studio 54 scene with what she later recalled as a sense of freedom rather than predation. Acting came gradually, then all at once: her father cast her in A Walk with Love and Death at sixteen, but it was Prizzi’s Honor in 1986 – also directed by John Huston – that delivered the Best Supporting Actress Oscar and silenced every doubter who had dismissed her as nepotistic casting.
“I thought, Watch me,” she has said of a producer who once called her “no good” mid-negotiation. That defiance has never quite dissipated. It has merely refined itself.
The decades since have been characterised by deliberate nonconformity. While peers chased eternal youth through surgical intervention, Huston gravitated toward roles that exploited age as an asset: the imperious matriarch in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, the terrifying Grand High Witch in Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches, the steely Director in John Wick. “Vanity never served me,” she has said. “Character acting reveals what’s underneath.”
The Cancer That Taught Her to Laugh
The private cancer battle, now disclosed, reframes the last six years of her career with startling clarity. Huston kept her diagnosis secret throughout, working steadily while undergoing treatment and monitoring. When she received the all-clear, she marked it with characteristic understatement.
“I just walked in my garden and smelled the roses and thought how clever I was,” she told People.
The experience, she says, fundamentally altered her relationship with professional anxiety. “It made me conscious of what I shouldn’t do, of places I shouldn’t go. One of those places was taking life too seriously. So now when the opportunity arises, I laugh, and I try not to make a big deal out of things.”
This is not the language of someone who has mellowed. It is the language of someone who has sharpened. The distinction matters. Hollywood is littered with stories of artists diminished by illness, their work thereafter suffused with sentimentality or fragility. Huston’s response has been the opposite: an intensification of purpose, a refusal to waste time on roles or projects that do not demand her full capabilities.
“Sometimes you feel like you don’t want to talk about it for the obvious reasons,” she said of her decision to finally go public, “but there’s a lot to be said for talking about it and getting it out there and celebrating the fact that one’s come through. Life is tenuous and wonderful. It also gives you the idea that the world is big and you can somehow match up to it.”
Hollywood’s Refusal to See Her
The broader context of Huston’s resurgence is an industry still struggling with its treatment of ageing women. As far back as 2005, she recounted to the Los Angeles Times a conversation with Maggie Smith, then seventy, who told her: “No darling, they don’t like old people there,” referring to Los Angeles. Two decades later, the structural problem persists, even as individual exceptions multiply.
Huston has never been content to play the victim of this dynamic. In a 2019 interview with Vulture, she articulated her standards with characteristic bluntness: “Quite honestly, I’m looking for movies that impress me in some way, that aren’t apologetically humble or humiliating like, ‘Band of cheerleaders gets back together for one last hurrah,’ you know. An old-lady cheerleader movie. I don’t like that kind of thing. If I’m going to be an old lady – and I’m sort of touching old lady these days – at least I want to be a special old lady.”
The comment drew a sharp riposte from Jacki Weaver, who starred in precisely the kind of film Huston had dismissed. But the underlying principle was clear: Huston would rather work selectively than work constantly, and she would never accept diminishment as a condition of continued employment.
Her refusal to retire is itself a radical act. “I can’t imagine such a thing,” she told People when asked about stepping away. “I think it would be too much, even for me.” The line is vintage Huston – self-aware, faintly amused, entirely serious.
The Witches We Need
Huston’s upcoming slate suggests she has no intention of coasting on nostalgia. She is set to star alongside her brother Danny Huston in The Christmas Witch Trial of La Befana, a hybrid live-action and animated feature inspired by Italian folklore. She plays the Befana, a figure she describes as “a lovely, horrible witch” – a role that returns her to territory she first explored in Roeg’s The Witches and has revisited intermittently ever since.
“I like playing witches,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “I’ve played Morticia Addams, who’s a favourite witch, and the grand high witch in The Witches for Nic Roeg, and I have to say… that was one of my favourite experiences just because he really encouraged me to be bad and there was something blasphemous about her.”
Danny Huston called the collaboration “a highlight of my career,” a sentiment that underscores the family’s enduring creative bond – a lineage that stretches back to Walter Huston’s Oscar-winning performance in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and forward through John Huston’s directorial legacy and now into the next generation.
What Endures
Anjelica Huston’s legacy is not merely the sum of her roles or her awards, though both are formidable. It is the example she provides: proof that talent, when combined with stubbornness and a willingness to age visibly and unapologetically, can outlast any industry’s attempts to render women invisible.
When she described Lady Tressilian to Vogue as “old lace that you find – you know the lace has been there for years, but you’re just rediscovering it,” she was speaking about a character. She was also, unmistakably, speaking about herself.
Huston is not old lace. She is new steel – tempered by loss, refined by illness, sharpened by decades of refusing to be anything other than exactly what she is. At seventy-three, with a cancer survival behind her and a career renaissance underway, she remains what she has always been: impossible to ignore, impossible to diminish, and entirely, unyieldingly herself.
As Lady Tressilian might ring her bell, Huston’s presence still demands – and deserves – our attention.
Anjelica Huston appears in Towards Zero, streaming on BritBox and BBC iPlayer. The Christmas Witch Trial of La Befana is in production.
