At 74, Anjelica Huston Tells the Truth about Oprah Winfrey | HO!!!!

The night Anjelica Huston won her Oscar, the applause inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion sounded like thunder rolling through velvet. Back at home in Los Angeles, the TV in a modest living room flickered beside a chipped mug of iced tea, a tiny refrigerator magnet shaped like a worn American flag holding up a grocery list on the door.

On-screen, a younger Anjelica clutched the gold statue, eyes shining, voice trembling as she said, “I’d like to thank the members of the Academy for honoring my fellow nominees and myself. This means a lot to me since it comes from a role in which I was directed by my father.” It looked like a perfect American movie ending.

What nobody in that living room could see was the weight hidden under her smile: a lifetime of unsteady love, complicated family loyalties, a body quietly betraying her dream of motherhood, and a chilly silence from one of the most powerful women in entertainment—Oprah Winfrey—that began the night Anjelica’s name was called instead of hers. That Oscar didn’t just crown a career; it quietly changed the temperature of every room Anjelica walked into.

Years later, at 74, Anjelica would look back at that night and say the real story didn’t start when she won—it started with what she lost before she ever stepped onto that stage.

She had entered the world as Hollywood royalty on paper and emotional exile in practice. Born July 8, 1951, to legendary director John Huston and ballerina Enrica Soma, Anjelica’s arrival should have been cinematic. Instead, her father was thousands of miles away in Uganda, buried in a film shoot. It took days for the news to reach him.

When it did, his response was matter‑of‑fact, almost clinical, the way a director might note another scene added to the schedule. That distance became a kind of weather in her childhood—always there, even when the sun seemed to be shining. Before Anjelica turned one, her mother absorbed the first shattering betrayal.

John Huston not only blocked Enrica from a role in “Moulin Rouge”; he cast another woman and began an affair with her. What followed were long disappearances, rumors, and confirmations of infidelity that seeped into every corner of their family life like a draft that never stopped.

In 1960, Enrica packed up Anjelica and her brother Tony and relocated them from Ireland to London, hoping geography could fix what loyalty hadn’t. It didn’t. While John kept spinning around the world in a haze of romance and work, Enrica, exhausted and lonely, fell into her own complicated involvement with a married man and later gave birth to another daughter, Allegra, in 1964.

Anjelica fell for the baby instantly. Allegra became the one person Anjelica instinctively wanted to protect, a younger sister she’d later turn to for clarity when every supposed adult in the room had failed her. The houses they lived in were beautiful enough for magazine spreads, but what Anjelica needed couldn’t be photographed: consistency, honesty, somebody who stayed.

That longing slid quietly into her teenage years, where one moment seemed to offer a different kind of future. While she was still in school, casting agents showed up looking for a Juliet for a new film version of “Romeo and Juliet.” Suddenly, there it was—a door swung open in front of her. For a moment, she thought she might step through on her own terms. Then her father intervened. If she was going to act, he said, it would be for him.

That decree sent her not to Verona, but to a project called “A Walk With Love and Death” in 1969, directed by John himself. On paper, it looked like a dream: father guiding daughter into the family business. On set, it was emotionally draining, confusing, and deeply exposing. When the film finally came out, critics were unforgiving.

Their words didn’t just land on the movie; they landed on her. She drifted through school after that, skipping classes, leaning into distraction instead of direction, while her mother tried to hold together a life that felt like it was constantly slipping through her fingers.

Then came the phone call that would carve a permanent line through Anjelica’s life: before and after.

She was jolted awake one night by a family friend whose face told the story before her words did. Enrica Soma had been killed in a car accident in France. She was only 39. The news didn’t knock the breath out of Anjelica so much as rearrange it. The one person who had loved her without conditions—even if imperfectly—was simply gone.

Grief pushed her across the Atlantic to New York, where the city’s restless energy met her at the door. Almost immediately, Harper’s Bazaar requested her for a photo shoot tied to “A Walk With Love and Death.” She was paired with a brilliant, volatile photographer, Bob Richardson. At first, he looked like a portal out of pain—intense, worshipful, promising escape, devotion, a future built for two. She was barely 18. He was 42. He had his own history of addiction, institutionalization, and a marriage wreckage smoldering behind him.

What arrived as safety gradually revealed itself as control.

In the beginning, the attention felt like oxygen. Someone wanted her in every frame, every room, every moment. But the dynamic mirrored what she’d grown up with: older man, younger woman, chaos disguised as passion. As her modeling and acting opportunities grew, so did the fractures in their relationship.

Richardson’s temper surfaced in ways that left marks you couldn’t photograph. Once, she left briefly for a TV appearance. When she returned to their hotel room, he had destroyed all her belongings over something as small as unopened suitcases. It was less an outburst than a message: she was not allowed to exist outside his frame.

The breaking point arrived in Mexico, during a tense trip with her father and his new fiancée, Cici. One night, after sharing a quiet drink with John—just a daughter trying to touch the outline of a father who’d always been slightly out of reach—she returned to face Richardson’s fury. He threw a bottle at her. That was the translation of his love.

When they got back to Los Angeles, she left. After three years of fear, she walked out of a story that had never truly been about her. She found refuge at Cici’s home in Pacific Palisades—a place with horses, open air, and long only‑child stretches of silence where nobody demanded anything from her. She dodged Cici’s well‑intentioned attempts to set her up with someone new, insisting she needed space. Then an invitation slipped in through the side door of her life: a party at the home of a rising star named Jack Nicholson.

That night in the hills, the lights of Los Angeles laid out beneath them like another galaxy, Anjelica’s carefully guarded distance failed.

They started a relationship that felt thrilling and off-balance from the beginning. Both careers were climbing. She went to London for work, he filmed elsewhere, and the distance between them filled quickly with doubt. Just days after she left, a friend came to her with a confession delivered like a secret that burned her tongue: she’d slept with Jack hours after Anjelica had flown out. Jack talked his way out of it.

She stayed. But the trust never truly came back. From that point on, suspicion didn’t just haunt the relationship—it was usually confirmed. Jack’s affairs were poorly hidden, as if he couldn’t be bothered to cover them. Anjelica endured.

She still avoided using her father’s name as a shortcut. She wanted her work to be hers, even as she found herself constantly orbiting famous men. By 1976, the cracks in her relationship with Jack had widened into a canyon. While he headed to New York on a lighthearted trip with friends, she stayed in Los Angeles, drifting through gatherings where everyone smiled too widely and laughed just a little too loud.

At one of those parties, she met Ryan O’Neal. Attractive, electric, and visibly dangerous in the way only someone who hasn’t met a boundary they respect can be, he pulled her into yet another orbit. When Jack returned, ready to slip back into their usual pattern, Anjelica shocked him and herself. She told him she believed she was in love with O’Neal and she was leaving. The words weren’t entirely solid inside her, but they were solid enough to change everything.

At the same time, she was trying again with acting, aiming for a role in “The Last Tycoon.” The audition became another cut. Director Elia Kazan told her bluntly she didn’t have the beauty for the part she wanted—and offered her a smaller, more humiliating consolation role instead. She took it. The cast was star‑studded. Jack Nicholson was there too. Life blurred. She found herself entangled between both men, trying to draw lines on water.

With O’Neal, the charm came with a dark twin. She later described him as two people in one body. Moments of sweetness and attention flipped with no warning into volatility. During one party, when he couldn’t find her fast enough, frustration escalated into full‑blown assault. He struck her, chased her upstairs when she fled, and continued the attack even as she locked herself in a bathroom. The walls barely slowed him down.

She had no stable adult to turn to, no guide who had ever shown her what love was supposed to look like. So she asked the person whose judgment she trusted most: her 13‑year‑old half sister, Allegra—the little girl she’d once vowed to protect. Allegra listened and offered the kind of clarity most grown‑ups never manage. One word. Leave.

It should not have fallen on a teenager to say it. But it did.

That was the second time Anjelica walked away from a man who claimed to love her and showed it with destruction.

In the wake of “The Last Tycoon,” she stepped away from film toward a different silence—five years without a new role. When director Bob Rafelson later offered her a part in “The Postman Always Rings Twice” opposite Nicholson and Jessica Lange, she said yes. Part of it was opportunity. Part of it was a connection that wouldn’t die, no matter how much it hurt her.

Before she could fully explore what that meant, life slammed the brakes in a very different way. A serious car accident sent her flying into the windshield—no seat belt, no warning. She needed surgery to repair her face. The physical pain was blinding, but the realization underneath it was sharper: she had spent too many years waiting—waiting for fathers, lovers, directors to decide she was worth steady attention. Approaching 30, she finally turned that question inward.

She began to build a life that was hers. She took smaller roles, focused, worked, survived without leaning on the Huston name like a credit card. Then a complicated opportunity arrived: “Prizzi’s Honor.” The project came with a stacked set of strings attached—Jack Nicholson as her co‑star, her father as director. Initially, she resisted, wary of stepping into something that looked exactly like the pattern she’d been trying to escape. Eventually, she agreed.

If working with her father on “A Walk With Love and Death” had felt like an initiation, this felt like a test she couldn’t afford to fail. Then, during salary negotiations, someone involved with the movie delivered a line that might have once broken her. She was told, flatly, that she had no real talent—that she was only there because of the people around her. In another version of her story, that sentence might have sent her running. In this one, it sparked something else.

She stayed. She worked. She turned in a performance no one could dismiss as an inheritance. Out of “Prizzi’s Honor’s” eight Academy Award nominations, only one turned into a win: Anjelica Huston’s.

When her name was called, she didn’t head straight to the press line or the parties. She ran backstage to her father. John Huston, who had once been an ocean of absence, now sat there in tears. She threw her arms around him, thanking him—not as a famous director but as a parent who had finally, in his own flawed way, shown up. For the first time, she let herself believe the success was actually hers.

What the cameras didn’t catch was the way that single golden statue would quietly rearrange her life again.

In the years that followed, John Huston poured the last of his strength into “The Dead,” determined to make it a family legacy. Tony Huston, Anjelica’s brother, quietly wrote the script. John himself directed with oxygen tanks never far from his reach. The crew bent every rule to accommodate his fragile health. Watching him work that way, more spirit than body, took a toll on Anjelica. She pushed herself until her own health snapped, leaving her physically exhausted and sick.

Not long after filming wrapped, her father’s condition worsened. She visited him daily in the hospital, clinging to routine—familiar coffee, the same route, the same elevator, like rituals might hold him here. One night, she said goodnight, promising to return the next day. He died before she could. He was 81. Their early years had been defined by distance; the end was overshadowed by a closeness that arrived just in time to make losing him feel like having the ground pulled out from under her.

As that decade ended, another long chapter closed quietly. Her turbulent relationship with Jack Nicholson dissolved for good by 1990—not with a dramatic showdown, but with the kind of slow ending where you suddenly realize the story has already been over for a while.

Looking for breathing room, she headed to Cannes as a festival juror. Cameras followed. So did invitations. One involved an unexpected date with Prince Albert of Monaco—charming, glamorous, a headline waiting to write itself. But it was fleeting. The real turning point came in a far less flashy moment, when a friend casually introduced her to sculptor Robert Graham.

If the men before had felt like storms, Robert was something else entirely—a steady tide.

With Robert, she finally stepped into a quieter kind of happiness, the kind that didn’t need a spotlight to feel real. Love, for once, did not depend on her tolerating chaos. At the same time, her career found a new gear. A role she’d secretly imagined since childhood landed in her lap. Growing up, she had devoured “Addams Family” cartoons, quietly dreaming of playing Morticia one day. Now, the universe called her bluff.

But the fantasy came with a price in the most literal sense—her body. The elegance of Morticia hid a punishing physical routine. Corsets were cinched so tight she couldn’t sit in a car. Her makeup required fabric tabs glued to her face and taped behind her head to pull her skin taut, a process that left her with headaches and rashes. What looked effortless on screen was a workday of discomfort. And yet, it paid off.

“The Addams Family” became a massive hit and then something rarer: a timeless favorite. Anjelica’s Morticia etched itself into pop culture, the kind of performance that still shows up decades later in Halloween costumes and fan art.

Away from the cameras, her life with Robert deepened. During a trip to Ireland to visit her childhood home—a place layered with ghosts of memory—Robert surprised her by proposing. They married in 1992. For the first time, Anjelica believed she’d found something that might actually last, something that didn’t hinge on her performance or patience.

But under that joy, there was a quiet, persistent question she had been able to ignore while her love life was a storm: motherhood.

Her earlier relationships had been too unstable for it to even be an option. After finally closing the chapter with Jack, she let herself look at the possibility more clearly. Clinical tests turned hope into hard facts. Doctors told her she had endometriosis, a condition that made pregnancy unlikely. The words didn’t come with drama—just medical explanation and percentages—but they tore through her. The diagnosis stirred up a mix of anger, grief, and a quiet sense of inadequacy she rarely admitted out loud.

After marrying Robert, she and her husband tried anyway, pursuing fertility treatments with the kind of cautious optimism only couples in that waiting room understand. Each attempt carried hope like a fragile glass. Each failed result added to a private grief she carried even while smiling on red carpets or taking direction on set. There was no headline about it, no public statement. Just one more dream she had to put down gently.

Freed from the shadows of her father’s legacy and Jack Nicholson’s fame, the 1990s became a period of steady, almost understated professional growth. Anjelica took on roles across film and television and stepped behind the camera as a director herself. Without meaning to, she became the kind of easy A‑list presence she had grown up watching—except this time, she didn’t feel like she was standing in anyone’s reflection.

Her work in “The Royal Tenenbaums” brought another wave of critical praise, but the experience of making it was far rougher than the final cut suggested. Behind the scenes, veteran actor Gene Hackman’s behavior toward the young director, Wes Anderson, often turned hostile. The atmosphere got tense enough that Anjelica and Bill Murray found themselves running interference like unofficial bodyguards. Murray even showed up on days he wasn’t scheduled to work, just to shield Anderson. It seemed like the beginning of a friendship forged in shared purpose.

But when she and Murray reunited later for “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” the warmth was gone. He was distant, more dismissive than friendly, famously leaving her out of a cast dinner early in the shoot. She watched people she had defended pretend not to remember the bond. It was a lesson she’d already learned in her personal life: the history you think you share with someone doesn’t always match the story they tell themselves.

That wouldn’t be the only chill she felt.

In the years after her Oscar win, Anjelica began to sense a quiet distance from one of the most powerful figures in entertainment—Oprah Winfrey. In 1986, when Anjelica won for “Prizzi’s Honor,” her fellow nominees included Oprah, celebrated that year for her performance in “The Color Purple.” In a different universe, the story might have ended with an embrace, a shared moment between two women at the top of their craft. According to Anjelica, that’s not what happened.

Instead of warmth, she remembers coldness. No congratulations, no shared nod of respect. Just a space that never closed again. Oprah never publicly attacked her; there was no dramatic confrontation. But in Anjelica’s telling, the silence was its own message—that the loss wasn’t forgiven, and that from then on, she would remain at arm’s length. In an industry where public smiles often mask private scorecards, it was another reminder that success can come with invisible costs. Winning meant walking into rooms where one of the most influential women in media kept the emotional temperature just below freezing.

At the same time, Anjelica thought she’d finally secured a stable home base in her marriage to Robert Graham. Their home in Los Angeles became a quiet sanctuary—art on the walls, a rhythm of work and dinner and small rituals that didn’t require a photographer to be real. They had made their peace with life as it was, without children, holding on to the love they did have.

Then, in 2007, the pattern that had haunted her life returned: sudden, irreversible loss.

Robert became seriously ill. Within six months, he was gone. The speed of it turned shock into a kind of numbness. She had found the partner who didn’t require her to shrink or twist herself into a new shape. And then, just like her mother, just like her father, he was taken away before she was ready. This time, Anjelica’s response was different. She didn’t rush to fill the space. She didn’t seek another relationship. She chose to live with the love she’d already known, as if starting over romantically would be a betrayal—not of Robert, but of the version of herself that had finally learned what healthy love looked like.

Healing came in layers. She poured herself into work again—projects like the TV series “Smash”—and eventually into two memoirs that dug deep into her past. On the page, she traced not just her life with Robert, but the emotional fractures of her childhood, the betrayals that had shaped her understanding of love, and the surprising places where forgiveness finally took root.

One wound had taken longer than almost any other to face. John Huston’s affairs were never a secret. She had grown up watching other women slip in and out of their lives like characters in a long, confusing film. But one relationship crossed a line even she could barely name. Her father began seeing her teenage friend Zoë Sallis. It wasn’t just another affair; it was a collision of roles: father, director, lover, friend.

He revealed the full impact of that choice in the bluntest way possible—by announcing the birth of a son. That boy, Danny Huston, would one day become not just her half brother, but a cherished part of her life and career. For a long time, though, Danny’s very existence was a living symbol of her father’s ability to blur boundaries in ways that left her feeling both expendable and complicit.

Forgiving that took years. It meant accepting that love from flawed people rarely arrives clean. It meant deciding, deliberately, to fold Danny into her heart without pretending the circumstances of his birth didn’t wound her. Eventually, her relationship with her father softened in memory. The rage cooled enough for affection to come through.

By the time she reached 74, Anjelica Huston had lived through nearly every kind of loss a person can face without becoming cynical beyond repair. She had loved powerful men who hurt her, protected men at work who later barely acknowledged her, and won an Oscar that subtly shifted her standing with one of the most influential women on Earth. She had longed for a child and been told her body would not cooperate. She had watched both parents and the husband she finally trusted disappear faster than any script could prepare her for.

The magnet on that refrigerator—the little American flag holding up an ordinary grocery list—may well still be sitting on some kitchen door, in some house where the TV keeps replaying clips of her most iconic roles. Morticia. Maerose. Etheline. To the audience, they’re characters. To Anjelica, they’re mile markers—evidence that she didn’t just survive the story she was given; she rewrote it in real time.

And the uneasy distance with Oprah Winfrey? It remains what it has always been: a quiet absence in a business that loves loud stories. There are no explosive confrontations, no headline‑grabbing exchanges. Just a sense, on Anjelica’s side, that one golden statue on a single night in 1986 created a subtle line she never quite stepped back over.

Today, when she speaks openly about the past—from the soft betrayal of a father who didn’t rush to the hospital when she was born, to the sharp pain of lovers who mistook possession for affection, to the quiet sting of industry frost—she does it not to settle scores, but to name patterns. She knows now that success and pain can sit in the same room, holding the same Oscar, under the same lights. She knows that family can wound you and still be worth building. She knows that a life without children can still be full of legacy.

What she finally tells the world at 74 isn’t a scandalous secret about Oprah Winfrey, Jack Nicholson, or Bill Murray. It’s something harder to accept and easier to miss: behind every red‑carpet picture there is a cost you don’t see, and the real power isn’t in avoiding pain—it’s in refusing to let it define the ending.