“She commanded the weather,” Anjelica Huston intones with quiet awe. Speaking over the phone from her home outside of Los Angeles, the legendary actress is reminiscing about one of the many formidable women that appeared at her family’s western Ireland manor house during her childhood. The aristocratic matron in question, Lady Hemphill, would often accompany her husband to the Huston estate, located in the rugged pastures and boglands of County Galway, for dinner parties and hunting expeditions. During the winters, as Huston remembers it, the noblewoman would cross the hallway from the dining room and throw open the doors, where she thrust her fingers into the icy night wind and proclaimed to all the men, “There won’t be hunting tomorrow.”
“[Then the men] would go off and play backgammon,” Huston says with a laugh. “We’d always listen to her because she was always right.”
There is something of Lady Hemphill in the character of Lady Tressilian, the severe and unflappable matriarch in Agatha Christie’s classic whodunnit novel Towards Zero, adapted by the BBC into a three-part miniseries streaming on BritBox this week. Huston plays the brooding, bedridden widow who watches keenly over Gull’s Point, the Devonshire coastal estate that is both her domain and lookout tower. Fifteen years after her husband’s drowning in the nearby bay, Tressilian’s days are spent in a cranky routine: grumbling over the obscene resort stationed on the opposite bluff, reading London’s gossip columns, and summoning the household help with the insistent ringing of a bedroom call bell. That is, until she is able to convoke the various members of her estranged clan to the house for summer holiday (and a requisite changing of her will). These include her philandering nephew, a professional tennis champion; both his ex-wife and current wife; a banished cousin from the East; and the family lawyer. From her bedroom lookout, she excoriates them as “a nest of vipers.”
“I think [Lady Tressilian] was mostly a creature of circumstance,” Huston explains of the fictional grand dame. “She’d lost her footing some years before, and she was making do. It wasn’t a happy existence, but she’d found her way of controlling it. And she doesn’t miss out on a lot of action. She knows what’s going on at all times.” In true Christie fashion, the Tressilian reunion inevitably leads to murder, familial treachery, and a labyrinthine hunt for the killer.
Huston could recognize the ways of that brood: her own renowned and eccentric family inhabited that domestic world of privilege, power, infidelity, and intrigue that became Christie’s writerly milieu. Her famous grandfather, Walter Huston, was a Broadway theater performer turned Hollywood actor in the 1930s and ’40s, while her father, John Huston, was perhaps the most important and imposing journeyman filmmaker of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The family was Scotch-Irish by ancestry, and Huston fils chose to leave California for Ireland after the House Un-American Activities Committee began its (mostly baseless) investigations into the film industry’s ties with the Communist Party in the late 1940s.
As Huston detailed in her 2013 memoir, A Story Lately Told, she was born in Los Angeles but spent most of her childhood at St. Clerans, her family’s 110-acre Irish estate. Despite its remote location, the 18th-century Georgian home was a stopover for a procession of nobles, actors, and writers, like Peter O’Toole, John Steinbeck, Marlon Brando, and Montgomery Clift. The leonine Huston men, however, remained mostly absent from her early life—Huston’s grandfather had died shortly before her birth, while her father spent large periods of the year traveling and working on films from The Barbarian and the Geisha to The Misfits. This left the young Huston in the company of her Italian mother, a free-spirited and fashionable former ballerina in the Ballet Theatre (later the American Ballet Theatre), as well as an older brother, nurses, servants, tutors, and numerous animals.
Like the dignified setting of Christie’s Towards Zero, Huston described St. Clerans as a “male-driven atmosphere” that was nonetheless “totally reliant on the women, who were always very strong and very necessary.” Among these women were Dorothy Jeakins, Iris Tree, Pauline de Rothschild, and the golden Guinness Girls, Irish socialites from the 1920s whom her father called beautiful witches. Huston remembers them all as tough, very present, and “very beautiful, but in unusual ways.”
She also recalls a visit from Carson McCullers, one of the 20th century’s most precocious female authors, then in the depths of chronic illness. McCullers was delivered to the doors of St. Clerans in an ambulance and spent the entirety of her visit in bed. “One would be hard-pressed to call her a classical beauty,” Huston recalls, “but she was very impressive. She was all eyes and nose on this little tiny neck. She was more like a child than a woman… very fragile. So it was an odd combination—she and my father.” McCullers died only months after her departure.
Between this cavalcade of visitors, Huston describes long periods of domestic solitude, where she indulged her fantasies of Gothic horror and folk tales. She obsessed over the cartoons of Charles Addams, particularly the figure of Morticia; the photographs of gored Spanish bullfighter Manolete; and Grimms’ Fairy Tales. “They were the stories that stirred me,” she says. “I remember the element of fear. Fear and beauty—that mixture. It was almost operatic: beautiful but not without dread.” During this time, she also made her acting debut with an abortive drawing-room performance as one of Macbeth’s witches.
In this hothouse atmosphere, Huston says that she sometimes felt herself born in the wrong place and time—an imagined nostalgia that she explored with Victorian fashions. “It was a little bit Edward Gorey,” she muses. “I remember curling my hair in ringlets and wearing Victorian dresses and cameos—that look was very appealing to me at the time.” Ditto during her time in West London, where her mother relocated after separating from her father. Between her early photo shoots with Richard Avedon, Derek Bailey, and Bob Richardson, and her first efforts at acting, Huston immersed herself in the bohemian culture, fashion, and parties, encountering everyone from Dirk Bogarde to Marianne Faithfull to James Fox. About that time, she waxes equally nostalgic: “I think a lot of it was real and grounded, but a lot of it was also fanciful. It was a kind of a Victorian romance.”
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Huston says she has always maintained a closer sense of identity with England and the Continent than America, despite living here since the 1970s. She attributes her performances of Gothic characters, from Morticia Addams to the Grand High Witch and Cinderella’s Wicked Stepmother, to these fey daydreams of her youth, along with the many female figures who surrounded her. “It’s this crossover between the scarily Gothic and these grand ladies… I think they kind of come together in my history,” she says.
As for the rigors of playing Lady Tressilian, a woman whose ear and pedigree extend across the whole of the kingdom but whose actual domain is reduced to the confines of her own bed, Huston laughs: “It was great. I got up in the morning and went to work and to bed. Then, I got out of bed at work and went home to bed.”
Yet looking over her memories, Huston sees the character of Lady Tressilian really as a palimpsest from a lifetime of nostalgic fantasy. “I think definitely there’s a sense of harkening back—and almost a rewriting,” she says, her voice suddenly quiet and awestruck again, about inhabiting the role. “I think it’s like old lace that you find. You know the lace has been there for years, but you’re just rediscovering it.”