At 74, Anjelica Huston Tells the Truth about Oprah Winfrey

I’d like to thank the members of the academy for honoring my fellow nominees and myself. This means a lot to me since it comes from a role in which I was directed by my father. >> For years, Angelica Houston was admired as a symbol of strength and elegance. But her real story was far more painful than anyone imagined.

 Behind the glamour were family betrayals, broken relationships, and a heartbreaking medical diagnosis that ended her dream of becoming a mother. She also faced quiet but intense tensions in Hollywood, including an uneasy feud with Oprah Winfrey and a troubled history with Bill Murray. Now at 74, Angelica Houston is finally breaking her silence.

 and what she reveals changes everything we thought we knew about her life. Angelica Houston was born on July 8th, 1951 to legendary director John Houston and renowned ballerina Enrique Soma. She entered a world that looked glamorous from the outside but felt emotionally distant from the very beginning. When she was born, her father was thousands of miles away in Uganda, absorbed in a film shoot.

 It took days for the news to reach him. And when it did, his reaction was chillingly detached. That early absence wasn’t an exception. It became a pattern that quietly shaped Angelica’s family life and her understanding of love. Before Angelica turned one, her mother faced a painful betrayal. Houston not only denied S a role in Mulan Rouge, but he also began an affair with the woman he cast instead.

 Long disappearances followed along with a trail of infidelities that left the family emotionally fractured. In 1960, S relocated Angelica and her brother Tony from Ireland to London, seeking to rebuild stability. But complications lingered. While Houston continued his whirlwind romances, S was involved with a married man and later gave birth to another daughter, Algra, in 1964.

Angelica adored Algra, forming a deep protective bond, one that life would later put to the test in unexpected ways. While Angelica was still a student, an opportunity seemed to arrive unexpectedly. A new film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet was searching for its Juliet at her school, and for a moment, the door appeared wide open.

 Angelica wanted to step through it, but her father intervened. If she were going to act, he insisted it would be under his direction. That decision led her to A Walk with Love and Death in 1969, a choice that would haunt her. Working beside her father was emotionally draining, and when the film was released, critics were unforgiving.

A drift, Angelica slipped through her school years with little direction, skipping classes and chasing distraction, while her mother, Enria Soma, remained emotionally consumed by the collapse of her own life. Then came the night that shattered everything. [music] Angelica was jolted awake by a family friend with news she could barely process.

 Her mother had died in a car accident in France. She was only 39. Grief pushed Angelica to New York, where a new chapter began almost immediately. Harper’s Bizaarre requested her for a photo shoot ahead of the film’s release, pairing her with the brilliant yet volatile photographer Bob Richardson, he quickly pulled her into his orbit, promising escape, devotion, and a future together.

Unaware of the danger beneath his charm, Angelica stepped into a world she wasn’t prepared to navigate. Losing her mother’s steady, unconditional love left a void Angelica didn’t know how to fill. In its place came Bob Richardson’s relentless attention, which at first felt like safety.

 The imbalance between them mirrored her parents’ past. He was 42, she barely 18. But beneath the intensity was chaos. Richardson struggled with addiction, had been institutionalized, and carried the wreckage of a marriage that had collapsed under its own excesses. What seemed like devotion slowly revealed itself as control. Ironically, [music] even as critics dismissed her first film, the wider world had begun to notice Angelica.

Modeling and acting opportunities followed, and as her independence grew, the fractures in her relationship became impossible to ignore. Richardson’s temper surfaced in frightening ways. Once after she briefly left for a television appearance, he destroyed all her belongings in their hotel room over something as small as unopened suitcases.

The breaking point came during a tense trip to Mexico with her father and his new fiance Cece. One night, after Angelica shared a quiet drink with her father, Richardson erupted in rage, hurling a bottle at her when she returned. The message was unmistakable. When they got back to Los Angeles, Angelica ended it.

 Finally stepping away from 3 years of fear, she sought refuge at Cece’s home in the Pacific Palisades, finding calm in horses, open air, and long stretches of silence. She avoided the awkward attempts to set her up until an invitation arrived for a party hosted by a rising star named Jack Nicholson. Still emotionally bruised, she was drawnin anyway.

 They began a relationship, uneven from the start. Both careers were taking off, forcing them [music] into a brief long-d distanceance stretch while she worked in London and he filmed elsewhere. Just days after she left, a friend delivered a quiet betrayal, admitting she’d slept with Jack hours after Angelica departed. He talked his way out of it, but the trust never fully returned.

 From then on, suspicion was usually confirmed. Jack didn’t hide his affairs well, and yet Angelica endured them. Through it all, she felt the pull to act again. But fear lingered. She refused to lean on her father’s legacy. even as she navigated Hollywood with one famous last name and a partner who happened to be its brightest star. By 1976, the cracks in Angelica Houston’s relationship with Jack Nicholson had finally split wide open.

 While Jack headed to New York on a carefree trip with friends, Angelica remained in Los Angeles, drifting through parties and unresolved emotions. It was at one of those gatherings that she crossed paths with Ryan O’Neal, restless, magnetic, and visibly troubled. When Jack returned home days later, Angelica stunned him with a confession she barely understood herself.

 She believed she was in love with O’Neal, and she was leaving. Around the same time, she made a determined return to acting, setting her sights on The Last Tycoon. The audition, however, became another wound. Director Alyia Kazan dismissed her with a cruel honesty, telling her she lacked the beauty for the role she wanted and offering her a humiliating consolation prize instead.

 She accepted, stepping into a glamorous ensemble cast that included a familiar presence, Jack Nicholson. Life blurred further as she found herself entangled with both men at once. What followed with O’Neal was a nightmare she later described as living with two people in one body. Moments of charm were eclipsed by sudden violence.

The abuse escalated brutally one night when he struck her during a party enraged simply because he couldn’t find her. She fled upstairs, locking herself in a bathroom, only for him to follow and continue the assault. With no adult guidance to turn to, Angelica sought clarity from the most unexpected voice, her 13-year-old halfsister, Algra, who offered a simple, devastating truth.

Leave. Disillusioned after The Last Tycoon, Angelica stepped away from film for five long years. When director Bob Rafelson later offered her a role in The Postman Always Rings Twice, opposite Nicholson and rising star Jessica Lang, she accepted. Part opportunity, part unresolved attachment. The discomfort of knowing her connections had opened doors lingered, but reflection was cut short by a violent car accident.

 Thrown into the windshield without a seat belt, she required surgery to repair her face. The physical pain was immense, but the realization that followed was sharper. She had spent too much of her life waiting. Approaching her 30s, Angelica finally shifted her focus inward. She had chased love through family, through men, hoping it would anchor her.

 Now she wanted something that belonged solely to her. She studied, took small roles, and survived without leaning on famous names. Then came an unexpected offer. Pritsy’s honor. The proposal was complicated. Jack as her co-star, her father as director. She resisted, then relented, only to be insulted during salary negotiations.

 Told she had no real talent and was present solely because of who surrounded her. Once those words would have crushed her. This time they ignited something else. Angelica Houston didn’t retreat. She stayed and proved definitively that she belonged. Out of the eight Academy Award nominations Preey’s honor received, only one turned into a win, and it belonged to Angelica Houston.

When her name was called, the moment felt almost unreal. Instead of heading toward the press, she ran straight back to her father. Tears streamed down his face as she threw her arms around him, thanking him not as a director, but as a parent. For the first time, her success was entirely her own, and she allowed herself to feel it.

In the years that followed, John Houston poured what little strength he had left into the dead, determined to make it a family legacy. Angelica’s brother, Tony, had quietly written the script, and despite her father’s fragile health, oxygen tanks never far from reach. The family and crew bent every rule to bring the film to life.

 Watching her father direct while visibly fading took a toll on Angelica, leaving her physically exhausted and seriously ill. Not long after the film was completed, her father’s condition worsened. Angelica visited him daily in the hospital, clinging to routine and hope. One night, she said goodbye, promising to return the next day.

 He passed away before she could. He was 81. Though their early years had been marked by distance, he had become a constant presence later in her life, making the loss deeply destabilizing.As the decade closed, her long turbulent relationship with Jack Nicholson quietly dissolved, ending for good by 1990. Seeking space, Angelica traveled to Khan as a festival juror, where attention quickly followed, including an unexpected date with Prince Albert of Monaco.

 It was charming, but fleeting in a twist worthy of a romantic comedy. It was a friend’s quiet introduction to sculptor Robert Graham that would gently steer her toward a different kind of ending. With Robert Graham by her side, Angelica Houston finally stepped into a quieter kind of happiness. Love for once felt steady, and almost in tandem, her career reached a long- aaited turning point.

Producers offered her a role she had imagined since childhood. Growing up, she had devoured the Adams family cartoons, secretly dreaming of becoming Morticia one day. The fantasy, however, came at a cost. The elegance of Morticia masked relentless physical discomfort. Her corsets were so tightly cinched, she couldn’t sit in a car, and her makeup required fabric tabs glued to her face and taped behind her head, pulling her skin taut and leaving her with headaches and rashes.

 It was punishing, exhausting work, but it paid off. The Adams family became a massive hit, evolving into a timeless favorite with Angelica’s performance etched permanently into pop culture. Away from the spotlight, love continued to deepen. During a trip to Ireland to visit her childhood home, Robert surprised her with a proposal.

 They married in 1992, and for the first time, Angelica believed she had found something lasting. Yet beneath the joy lingered an unspoken absence. Motherhood had never been a focus. Her past relationships had been too unstable. But after leaving Jack Nicholson behind, she finally confronted the question she’d long avoided, only to uncover a truth that would quietly break her heart.

Doctors eventually gave Angelica the answer she had both feared and avoided. She was diagnosed with endometriosis and told that becoming a mother was unlikely. The news cut deep, stirring feelings of anger and quiet inadequacy. After marrying Robert Graham, they pursued fertility treatments with hope and patience.

 But the outcome never changed. It was a private grief she carried while continuing to move forward. Freed at last from the shadows of her father’s legacy and Jack Nicholson’s fame, the 1990s became a period of remarkable professional growth, Angelica worked steadily across film and television and even stepped behind the camera as a director.

 Without trying to be one, she had become the very kind of effortless A-listister she’d grown up around. Her role in the Royal Tenon bombs brought critical acclaim, but the experience itself was far from idyllic. Behind the scenes, the atmosphere was tense and unsettling. Angelica later spoke of veteran actor Gene Hackman’s hostile behavior, particularly toward the young director, Wes Anderson.

 Things grew so uncomfortable that she and Bill Murray often intervened with Murray even showing up on his days off to shield Anderson. It might have forged a bond, but it didn’t last. When Angelica and Murray reunited on the life aquatic, the warmth was gone. He was distant, even dismissive, famously excluding her from a cast dinner early in the shoot.

 Unfortunately, this wasn’t the only battle. In later years, Angelica Houston found herself on the quiet side of attention she never quite understood. She has suggested that after winning her Oscar, an award that placed her ahead of Oprah Winfreyy’s celebrated performance in The Color Purple, she was met not with congratulations, but with cold distance.

 According to Angelica, Oprah never forgave the loss and from that point on kept her at arms length. Whether imagined or real, the silence became another reminder that even triumph can come with unseen consequences. At the same time, Angelica finally believed she had reached her long- aaited fairy tale with sculptor Robert Graham.

 Their marriage offered peace she had rarely known. But tragedy once again found its way in. In 2007, Robert became seriously ill and just 6 months later, he was gone. The loss left Angelica shattered. She never sought another romantic relationship, choosing instead to live with the love she had already known. Healing came through work and reflection.

 She poured herself into projects like the television series Smash and later into writing two deeply personal memoirs, stories that traced not only her life with Robert, but the emotional fractures of her upbringing. Although time eventually eased her relationship with her father, one childhood wound took years to forgive. John Houston’s many affairs were no secret.

 But one crossed a devastating line. He began a relationship with Angelica’s teenage [music] friend, Zoe Salis. He revealed the truth in the harshest way possible by announcing the birth of a son. That child, Danny Houston, would later become a cherished part of the family. But acceptance did not come quickly. ForAngelica, [music] forgiveness was a long, painful journey, one shaped by love, betrayal, and hard-earned grace.