Anjelica Huston was presented in 1999 with the Donostia Award at San Sebastian International Film Festival in recognition of a life and a career dedicated to cinema, something she has magnificently continued to do in the six years to have passed since then.

Third generation of an actor/director saga, Anjelica Huston was born in 1951. Her grandfather was the extraordinary actor Walter Huston and her father the excellent filmmaker John Huston. It was therefore logical that Anjelica follow in their steps, even though she initially did so with her father’s opposition. Anjelica spent almost all of her childhood in Ireland, far from the world of Hollywood, which did nothing to curb her fascination for acting. In 1969, she appeared for the first time in A Walk with Love and Death, directed by her father, with whom she wasn’t to work again until 1985, when she played the splendid part of Maerose Prizzi in Prizzi’s Honor, landing her first Academy Award as Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Two years later, her performance in John Huston’s last film, The Dead, was a real father and daughter gift to one another.

In 1989, she collaborated for the first time with Woody Allen on Crimes and Misdemeanours, with whom she repeated the experience in 1993 on Manhattan Murder Mystery.

Among her most famous movies are Paul Mazursky’s Enemies: A Love Story (1989), for which she received an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress; the two The Addams Family films (1991 and 1993), directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, in which she plays an unforgettable Morticia; Stephen Frears’ The Grifters (1990), for which she earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, and Sean Penn’s The Crossing Guard (1995). In 1996, Anjelica Huston moved on to directing with Bastard Out of Carolina, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, and in 1999 directed and starred in Agnes Browne, screened at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and winner of the Youth Award at San Sebastian Festival.

Her latest work as a director is a telemovie entitled Riding the Bus with My Sister, broadcast in May the same year and starring Andie MacDowell. We recently saw her in Clint Eastwood’s Blood Work (2002), and in two movies by Wes Anderson, The Royal Tennenbaums (2001) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). In the last year, she has worked on Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential alongside John Malkovich, and she has just completed the shooting of Martha Coolidge’s Material Girls.