Remember the actress Anjelica Huston? If her maiden name doesn’t ring a bell, you’ll definitely remember her by her classic role as Morticia Addams in the 1991 film, The Addams Family.
Huston has spent many years playing great matriarchs. From her turn as the wicked stepmother opposite Drew Barrymore‘s Cinderella in Ever After and her iconic Morticia Addams, to my favourite of all her characters, Etheline Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums.
She’s so compelling in every single one of these roles that it’s hard to believe she doesn’t have children of her own. But then again, her (Oscar-winning) day job is the ability to morph into people she’s not.
“Acting is a very liberating profession. It’s all about observation and transformation and finding out what makes people tick,” Huston tells me. “There is a lot of depth and understanding involved in the study of other homo sapiens.”
To be fair, she’s been able to study some of the more fascinating among us. Take Jack Nicholson, with whom she fell in love almost at first sight in 1973 and was with for 17 years.
Even though they met when he wasn’t a household name, she has said he always had that killer smile. Before that, as a model in her late teens, she was in a four-year relationship with a man twice her age: a manic-depressive fashion photographer.
What would she tell her younger self if she met her now? “Not to be so hard on herself or so eager to please,” she says. This surprises me because her outward appeal has always been a combination of self-assurance, effortless talent and unfiltered opinions.
Huston credits her father, the larger-than-life director John Huston, with helping her live a bold life.
“My dad used to say, ‘Just do it, honey! Don’t procrastinate too much. Make your decisions clear, even though they might not be popular,'” she recalls, noting that the person you need to please most is yourself. “You must be the one in charge of your actions.”
This segues nicely into why we are chatting in the first place: a fragrance inspired by this notion of authenticity.
The new Gucci Bloom Profumo di Fiori ($227 from Sephora Singapore) was blended by master perfumer Alberto Morillas and is characterised by a trio of jasmine bud extract, tuberose and rangoon creeper.
Huston describes the scent as “intoxicating” and says that despite wearing the same fragrance (which she declines to name) for the past 30 years, she now has this perfume in high rotation too.
Scent is powerful and evocative. Huston spent her childhood in Ireland and the better part of her adult life in Hollywood, so I ask her to share her most nostalgic scents.
“My mother’s scent of Shalimar, evergreens at Christmas time, bread baking in an oven, tomatoes ripened in the sun, night-blooming jasmine in Los Angeles in June, sage and chaparral in New Mexico, wood-burning fires, my dad’s and my late husband’s Montecristo cigars, wet grass, bog water, roses in springtime.”
Her memories paint a vivid picture, as does the campaign for Gucci Bloom.
It’s basically a fantastical, trippy garden sequence that triggers instant FOMO (you know, if you’re prone to that kind of thing): alongside Huston, there’s singer-songwriter Florence Welch, actor and model Jodie Turner-Smith and fashion designer Susie Cave.
The attitude of both the protagonists and the campaign is that we are free to be whoever we want to be. What does it take, right now, to be who you want to be, especially if you don’t easily blend in?
“It takes confidence and imagination and courage to be free, and also a healthy ego,” says Huston. “Freedom is daring to be and to act as you believe. It’s a beautiful concept and I think it makes you a better and nicer person in the end.”
In Huston’s mind, being truly free is about taking responsibility for your actions, your happiness and ultimately your destiny.
“There’s a strength and purity in making your own decisions and living with them,” she says. That’s easier said than done. What does she say to friends struggling with these ideals?
“Just try to be the best version of you. Otherwise you won’t be able to live with yourself.”
Has she ever helped someone be completely free, I wonder? “Well, not people,” she admits.
“I worked on a wonderful campaign to free chimpanzees from a terrible existence as laboratory experiments. We got them out of four-foot by seven-foot [1.2m x 2.1m] cages and into sanctuaries. I feel very good about that effort.”
As for what Huston does when she wants to feel liberated: “I love to walk in the rain – it reminds me of Ireland as a child when I was perhaps at my most free.” A valuable reminder that it’s not always a bad thing to forget your brolly.
This article was first published in The SIngapore's Womens Weekly.
