ballerina, and the formidable women who visited their estate.
“She controlled the weather,” Anjelica Huston recalls with quiet admiration. Speaking from her home near Los Angeles, the legendary actress reflects on one of the many strong-willed women who frequented her family’s estate in western Ireland during her childhood. The woman in question, Lady Hemphill, often joined her husband at the Huston home, nestled in the wild landscapes of County Galway, for dinners and hunting trips. Huston remembers how, in winter, the noblewoman would stride from the dining room, fling open the doors, and thrust her hand into the freezing night air before declaring to the men, “There will be no hunting tomorrow.”
“[Then the men] would go off and play backgammon,” Huston says with a laugh. “We always listened to her—she was never wrong.”
There’s a bit of Lady Hemphill in Lady Tressilian, the stern and unshakable matriarch in Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero, now adapted by the BBC into a three-part miniseries streaming on BritBox. Huston plays the sharp-eyed, bedridden widow who presides over Gull’s Point, her Devonshire coastal estate—both her kingdom and her watchtower. Fifteen years after her husband drowned in the nearby bay, Tressilian’s days follow a grumpy routine: complaining about the garish resort across the way, scanning London’s gossip columns, and summoning the household staff with the impatient ring of her bedroom bell. That is, until she gathers her estranged relatives for a summer visit (and a necessary update to her will). The group includes her womanizing nephew, a tennis champion; his ex-wife and current wife; a disgraced cousin from the East; and the family lawyer. From her bedroom perch, she dismisses them as “a nest of vipers.”
“I think [Lady Tressilian] was mostly a product of circumstance,” Huston says of the character. “She’d lost her footing years ago and was just getting by. It wasn’t a happy life, but she’d found a way to control it. And she doesn’t miss much—she always knows what’s happening.” True to Christie’s style, the family reunion spirals into murder, betrayal, and a tangled hunt for the killer.
Huston understands such dynamics well—her own illustrious and unconventional family moved in the same world of privilege, power, affairs, and intrigue that shaped Christie’s stories. Her grandfather, Walter Huston, was a Broadway star turned Hollywood actor in the 1930s and ’40s, while her father, John Huston, was one of the most formidable filmmakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The family had Scotch-Irish roots, and after the House Un-American Activities Committee began its (largely unfounded) investigations into Hollywood’s alleged Communist ties in the late 1940s, John Huston left California for Ireland.
As Huston recounted in her 2013 memoir, A Story Lately Told, she was born in Los Angeles but grew up mostly at St. Clerans, her family’s 110-acre Irish estate. Despite its isolation, the 18th-century Georgian house hosted a parade of nobles, actors, and writers—Peter O’Toole, John Steinbeck, Marlon Brando, and Montgomery Clift among them. Yet the Huston men were often absent in her early years—her grandfather died just before her birth, and her father spent much of his time traveling or working on films like The Barbarian and the Geisha and The Misfits. Instead, young Anjelica was raised by her Italian mother, a spirited former ballerina with a keen sense of style, and the formidable women who passed through their home.a ballerina with the Ballet Theatre (later the American Ballet Theatre), an older brother, nurses, servants, tutors, and many animals.
Huston described St. Clerans as a “male-driven atmosphere” that still depended entirely on the women, who were strong and indispensable. Among them were Dorothy Jeakins, Iris Tree, Pauline de Rothschild, and the glamorous Guinness Girls—1920s Irish socialites her father called “beautiful witches.” Huston remembers them as tough, vivid presences, “very beautiful, but in unusual ways.”
She also recalls a visit from Carson McCullers, one of the 20th century’s most brilliant female writers, who arrived in an ambulance, frail from chronic illness, and stayed in bed the entire time. “You wouldn’t call her classically beautiful,” Huston says, “but she was striking—all eyes and nose on a delicate neck, more like a child than a woman. Fragile. It was an odd pairing—her and my father.” McCullers died just months after leaving.
Between these visitors, Huston spent long stretches alone, lost in Gothic horror and fairy tales. She was fascinated by Charles Addams’ cartoons (especially Morticia), photos of the gored bullfighter Manolete, and Grimms’ Fairy Tales. “Those were the stories that moved me,” she says. “The mix of fear and beauty—almost operatic, beautiful but full of dread.” During this time, she also made her acting debut in an ill-fated drawing-room performance as one of Macbeth’s witches.
In this intense environment, Huston often felt out of place, as if born in the wrong era—a feeling she indulged by dressing in Victorian styles. “It was a bit Edward Gorey,” she reflects. “I wore ringlets, Victorian dresses, cameos—that look really appealed to me.” The same whimsy followed her to West London after her parents’ separation. Between early photo shoots with Richard Avedon, Derek Bailey, and Bob Richardson, and her first acting roles, she immersed herself in bohemian culture, mingling with figures like Dirk Bogarde, Marianne Faithfull, and James Fox. “Some of it was real, some fanciful,” she says. “A kind of Victorian romance.”
Huston in the United Kingdom in 1971.
Photo: Getty Images
Unsurprisingly, Huston has always felt more connected to England and Europe than America, despite living in the U.S. since the 1970s. She credits her portrayals of Gothic characters—from Morticia Addams to the Grand High Witch and Cinderella’s Wicked Stepmother—to these childhood fantasies and the formidable women around her. “There’s this crossover between Gothic horror and grand ladies… they merge in my history,” she says.
As for playing Lady Tressilian—a woman of vast influence confined to her bed—Huston laughs: “It was great. I got up, went to work, went to bed. Then got out of bed at work and went home to bed.”
Looking back, she sees Lady Tressilian as a reflection of her lifelong nostalgia. “There’s definitely a sense of looking back—almost rewriting,” she says, her voice softening. “Inhabiting…”The role. “I think it’s like finding old lace. You know the lace has been there for years, but you’re just rediscovering it.”