John Huston - born 100 years ago
Filmmaker John Huston - born 100 years ago Saturday, on Aug. 5, 1906 in Nevada, Missouri - was an American film director and actor and is said to be the inventor of the “Film Noir” genre.
The photo shows John Huston with Anjelica Huston arriving at the Berlin film festival “Berlinale” in 1963.
He began his film career as a screenwriter and made films mainly adapted from books or plays.
John Huston made some of cinema’s most enduring classics, among them The Maltese Falcon (1941) with Humphrey Bogart as private investigator Sam Spade, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1947), The African Queen (1951), Moby Dick (1956), The Misfits (1960) with an all-star cast including Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach, and Prizzi’s Honor (1985) with Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner, Robert Loggia, William Hickey and his daughter Anjelica Huston.
He was nominated 14 times for the Academy Award, for writing, directing and acting. In an era of studio films shot on Hollywood sets, Huston made movies in Africa, Mexico, Ireland and on the open sea, through multiple marriages, public brawls and bouts with alcohol. Famously, Huston spent long evenings carousing in the Nevada casinos after filming, surrounded by reporters and beautiful women, gambling, drinking, and smoking cigars. During the times of the shoot for Misfits Clark Gable remarked that ‘if he kept it up he would soon die of it’. Ironically, and tragically, Gable died three weeks after the end of filming from a massive heart attack while Huston went on to live for twenty-six more years.
Huston, playing the cooly brutal character Noah Cross in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, was nominated for the Academy award for Best Supporting Actor as the film’s central heavy against Jack Nicholson. In the 1970s, he was a frequent actor in Italian films.
Huston’s films were insightful about human nature and human predicaments. They also sometimes included scenes or brief dialogue passages that were remarkably prescient concerning environmental issues that came to public awareness in the future, in the period starting about 1970; examples include The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1947) and Night of the Iguana (1964).
He died from emphysema on August 28, 1987 in Middletown, Rhode Island, at the age of 81. He is interred in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California.
