John Marcellus Huston (August 5, 1906 - August 28, 1987) was an American film director and actor.

He was born in Nevada, Missouri, the son of the Canadian-born actor, Walter Huston, and Rhea Gore; he was of Scottish and Irish descent on his father's side. Huston was raised by his maternal grandparents, Adelia Richardson and John Marcellus Gore.

Career

He began his film career as a screenwriter and made films mainly adapted from books or plays. The six-foot-two-inch, brown-eyed director also acted in a number of films, with distinction in Otto Preminger's The Cardinal for which he was nominated for the Academy award for Best Supporting Actor and in Roman Polanski's Chinatown as the film's central heavy against Jack Nicholson.

In 1941, Huston was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay for The Maltese Falcon and again in 1948 for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He was also an accomplished painter who created the 1982 label for Château Mouton Rothschild.

John Huston has the unique distinction of directing both his father Walter and his daughter Anjelica in Oscar-winning performances (in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Prizzi's Honor, respectively), making the Hustons the first family to have three generations of Academy Award winners.

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). Huston also directed The Misfits (film) with an all-star cast including Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach. Famously, Huston spent long evenings carousing in the Nevada casinos after filming, surrounded by reporters and beautiful women, gambling, drinking, and smoking cigars. Gable remarked during this time 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.

In the 1970s, he was a frequent actor in Italian films.

Personal life

Huston, an Episcopalian, was married to Dorothy Harvey, Lesley Black, Evelyn Keyes, (4) Enrica Soma, and Celeste Shane. All but the marriage to Soma, who died, ended in divorce. Among his children are the director Danny Huston and the actress Anjelica Huston. Among his friends were Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway.

He became an Irish citizen and his daughter Anjelica attended school in Ireland at Kylemore Abbey for a number of years.

He died from emphysema on August 28, 1987, at the age of 81. He is interred in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California.

As director

• The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• In This Our Life (1942)
• Across the Pacific (1942)
• The Battle of San Pietro (1945)
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1947)
• Key Largo (1948)
• We Were Strangers (1949)
• The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
• The Red Badge of Courage (1951)
• The African Queen (1951)
• Moulin Rouge (1953)
• Beat the Devil (1953)
• Moby Dick (1956)
• Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957)
• The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958)
• The Roots of Heaven (1958)
• The Unforgiven (1960)
• The Misfits (1960)
• The Secret Passion (1962)
• The List of Adrian Messenger (1963)
• The Night of the Iguana (1964)
• The Bible: In The Beginning (1966)
• Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)
• Sinful Davey (1969)
• A Walk with Love and Death (1969)
• The Kremlin Letter (1970)
• Fat City (1972)
• Man in the Wilderness (1971)
• The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)
• The Mackintosh Man (1973)
• The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
• Wise Blood (1979)
• Phobia (1980)
• Victory (1980)
• Annie (1982)
• Under the Volcano (1984)
• Prizzi's Honor (1985)
• The Dead (1987)

As an actor

• The Cardinal (1963, dir: Otto Preminger)
• Candy (1968, director: Christian Marquand)
• Rocky Road to Dublin (Documentary) (as Interviewee, 1968, director: Peter Lennon)
• De Sade (1969, dir: Cy Endfield)
• Myra Breckinridge (1970, dir: Michael Sarne)
• Man in the Wilderness (1971, dir: Richard C. Sarafian)
• The Bridge in the Jungle (1971)
• Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973, dir: J. Lee Thompson)
• Chinatown (1974, dir: Roman Polanski)
• The Wind and the Lion (1975, dir: John Milius)
• Tentacles (1977, dir: Ovidio G. Assonitis)
• The Greatest Battle (1978, dir: Umberto Lenzi)
• The Bermuda Triangle (1978, dir: Rene Cardona, Jr.)
• Angela (1978, dir: Boris Sagal)
• The Visitor (1979, dir: Giulio Paradisi)
• A Minor Miracle (1983, dir: Raoul Lomas)
• Lovesick (1984, dir: Marshall Brickman)
• Momo (1986, dir: Johannes Schaaf)