John Marcellus Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor.
91 Facts About John Huston
2.
John Huston wrote the screenplays for most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics, including The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen, The Misfits, Fat City, The Man Who Would Be King and Prizzi's Honor.
3.
John Huston directed both his father, Walter Huston, and daughter, Anjelica Huston, to Oscar wins.
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John Huston then moved to Mexico and began writing, first plays and short stories, and later working in Los Angeles as a Hollywood screenwriter, and was nominated for several Academy Awards writing for films directed by William Dieterle and Howard Hawks, among others.
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John Huston explored the visual aspects of his films throughout his career, sketching each scene on paper beforehand, then carefully framing his characters during the shooting.
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Some of John Huston's films were adaptations of important novels, often depicting a "heroic quest," as in Moby Dick, or The Red Badge of Courage.
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John Huston continued to take prominent supporting roles for the next two decades, including 1974's Chinatown, and he lent his booming baritone voice as a voice actor and narrator to a number of prominent films.
8.
John Huston was a citizen of the US by birth but renounced this to become an Irish citizen and resident in 1964.
9.
John Huston later returned to the US, where he lived the rest of his life.
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John Huston was born on August 5,1906, in Nevada, Missouri.
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John Huston was the only child of Rhea and Canadian-born Walter Huston.
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John Huston's father was an actor, initially in vaudeville, and later in films.
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John Huston's mother worked as a sports editor for various publications but stopped after John was born.
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John Huston later became highly successful on both Broadway and then in motion pictures.
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John Huston's parents divorced in 1913 when he was six years old.
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Young John Huston benefited greatly from seeing his father act on stage, and he was later drawn to acting.
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John Huston recovered after an extended bedridden stay in Arizona and moved with his mother to Los Angeles, where he attended Abraham Lincoln High School.
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John Huston dropped out after two years to become a professional boxer.
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John Huston ended his brief boxing career after suffering a broken nose.
20.
John Huston engaged in many interests, including ballet, English and French literature, opera, horseback riding, and studying painting at the Art Students League of Los Angeles.
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John Huston returned to New York City to live with his father, who was acting in off-Broadway productions, and had a few small roles.
22.
John Huston later remembered that while watching his father rehearse, he became fascinated with the mechanics of acting:.
23.
John Huston returned to Los Angeles and married Dorothy Harvey, a girlfriend from high school.
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John Huston worked for a period on the New York Graphic.
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John Huston's father had earlier moved there and already gained success in a number of films.
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John Huston received a script editing contract with Samuel Goldwyn Productions but, after six months of receiving no assignments, quit to work for Universal Studios, where his father was a star.
27.
Wyler and John Huston became close friends and collaborators on a number of leading films.
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John Huston gained a reputation as a "lusty, hard-drinking libertine" during his first years as a writer in Hollywood.
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John Huston described those years as a "series of misadventures and disappointments".
30.
John Huston suffered head trauma and Huston was charged with driving while intoxicated.
31.
John Huston was nominated for Academy Awards for his screenplays for both Ehrlich and Sergeant York.
32.
John Huston persuaded Warners to give him a chance to direct, under the condition that his next script became a hit.
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However, studio head Jack L Warner approved of Huston's treatment of Hammett's 1930 novel, and he stood by his word to let Huston choose his first subject.
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John Huston kept the screenplay close to the novel, keeping much of Hammett's dialogue, and directing it in an uncluttered style, much like the book's narrative.
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John Huston did unusual preparation for his first directing job by sketching out each shot beforehand, including camera positions, lighting, and compositional scale, for such elements as closeups.
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John Huston especially benefited by selecting a superior cast, giving Humphrey Bogart the lead role.
37.
In 1942 John Huston served in the United States Army during World War II, making films for the Army Signal Corps.
38.
John Huston performed an uncredited rewrite of Anthony Veiller's screenplay for The Stranger, a film he was to have directed.
39.
When John Huston became unavailable, the film's star, Orson Welles, directed instead; Welles had the lead role of a high-ranking Nazi fugitive who settles in New England under an assumed name.
40.
John Huston gave a supporting role to his father, Walter John Huston.
41.
Also in 1948, John Huston directed Key Largo, again starring Humphrey Bogart.
42.
John Huston was annoyed that the studio cut several scenes from the final release without his agreement.
43.
Some critics felt that, by this technique, John Huston had achieved an almost "documentary" style.
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John Huston had a great eye and he never lost his sense of composition.
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The film succeeded at the box office, and John Huston was again nominated for an Oscar for best screenplay and best director, along with winning the Screen Directors Guild Award.
46.
John Huston had, with friends including director William Wyler and screenwriter Philip Dunne, established the "Committee for the First Amendment", as a response to the ongoing government investigations into communists within the film industry.
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John Huston later described, in general, the types of people who were alleged communists:.
48.
John Huston took producing, writing, and directing credits for his next two films: Moulin Rouge ; and Beat the Devil.
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John Huston had been planning to film Herman Melville's Moby-Dick for the previous ten years, and originally thought the starring role of Captain Ahab would be an excellent part for his father, Walter John Huston.
50.
John Huston followed The Misfits with Freud: The Secret Passion, a film quite different from most of his others.
51.
John Huston explains how he became interested in psychotherapy, the subject of the film:.
52.
John Huston liked the town where filming took place so much that he bought a house near there, as did Burton and Taylor.
53.
Guillermo Wulff and John Huston became friends and always spent time together while John Huston was in town, more frequently at Wulff's El Dorado Restaurant on Los Muertos Beach.
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John Huston enjoyed directing the film, as it gave him a chance to indulge his love of animals.
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In 1967, John Huston gave Taoiseach Jack Lynch a tour of Ardmore and asked to form a committee to help foster a productive Irish film industry.
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John Huston served on the resulting committee with Irish filmmakers and journalists.
57.
John Huston was interviewed in Irish journalist Peter Lennon's Rocky Road to Dublin, where he argued that it was more important for Irish filmmakers to make films in Ireland than for foreign production companies to make international films.
58.
John Huston had been planning to make this film since the '50s, originally with his friends Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable.
59.
John Huston returned with an offbeat and somewhat controversial film based on the novel Wise Blood.
60.
John Huston's final film is an adaptation of the classic short story by James Joyce.
61.
John Huston directed most of the film from a wheelchair, as he needed an oxygen tank to breathe during the last few months of his life.
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John Huston died nearly four months before the film's release date.
63.
Towards the end of his career, John Huston began to play more prominent roles in films by other directors.
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John Huston had a little participation in 1967's Casino Royale as actor and director.
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John Huston acted in Roman Polanski's Chinatown as the film's master villain, and as President Teddy Roosevelt's secretary of state John Hay in The Wind and the Lion.
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John Huston enjoyed acting and denied that he took it all that seriously.
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John Huston said he did not regard himself very highly as an actor, saying he was proud only of his performance in Chinatown.
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John Huston played the Lawgiver in Battle for the Planet of the Apes.
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John Huston played the lead in Orson Welles's last completed film, The Other Side of the Wind.
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John Huston's films were insightful about human nature and human predicaments.
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John Huston spent long evenings carousing in the Nevada casinos after filming, surrounded by reporters and beautiful women, gambling, drinking, and smoking cigars.
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John Huston continued painting as a hobby for most of his life.
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John Huston loved the outdoors, especially hunting while living in Ireland.
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John Huston's friends included George Hodel, Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway.
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Humphrey Bogart was one of his best friends, and John Huston delivered the eulogy at his funeral.
76.
John Huston visited Ireland in 1951 and stayed at Luggala, County Wicklow, the home of Garech Browne, a member of the Guinness family.
77.
John Huston visited Ireland several times afterwards and on one of these visits, he purchased and restored a Georgian home, St Clerans, of Craughwell, County Galway.
78.
John Huston renounced his US citizenship and became an Irish citizen in 1964.
79.
John Huston was an accomplished painter who wrote in his autobiography, "Nothing has played a more important role in my life".
80.
John Huston later studied at the Art Students League of New York.
81.
John Huston painted throughout his life and had studios in each of his homes.
82.
John Huston had owned a wide collection of art, including a notable collection of Pre-Columbian art.
83.
John Huston died on August 28,1987, in his rented home in Middletown, Rhode Island, from pneumonia as a complication of lung disease, aged 81.
84.
John Huston is interred in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood with his mother.
85.
The moving image collection of John Huston is held at the Academy Film Archive.
86.
John Huston received 15 Oscar nominations in the course of his career and is the oldest person ever to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar when, at 79 years old, he was nominated for Prizzi's Honor.
87.
John Huston won two Oscars, for directing and writing the screenplay for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
88.
John Huston received the Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute in 1983, and the Career Achievement Award from the US National Board of Review of Motion Pictures in 1984.
89.
John Huston has the unique distinction of directing both his father Walter and his daughter Anjelica in Oscar-winning performances, making the Hustons the first family to have three generations of Academy Award winners.
90.
In 1960, John Huston was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contribution to motion pictures.
91.
In 1965, John Huston received the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement from the Writers Guild of America.