ANJELICA Huston is being swept into a new chapter of fame, writes Geoff Shearer.
Anjelica Huston has nothing to be embarrassed about. A respected figure among screen acting’s elite, she is being swept into a new chapter of fame – possibly her biggest yet – thanks to a big-budget Steven Spielberg-driven TV show about Broadway, named Smash.
Yet, after a 40-something-year career, the former catwalk model, 60, still delights in the vagaries of her chosen profession. “Well, you know, it’s embarrassing,” she says on set in an ornately Art Deco theatre in Staten Island, New York, “it’s constantly embarrassing, acting is an embarrassing way to live.”
She erupts into a fierce laugh, her angular face under her severe trademark Cleopatra-black bob, showing a surprising and endearing warmth. In the dimly lit basement, a former bar at the St George Theatre, with its 1920s baroque Italian/Spanish columns, blood-red walls and gothic-gold carved plaster ceilings, it is easy to see her in costume as Morticia Addams, or one of those essentially eccentric characters from her Wes Anderson films and, at a stretch, as gold-haired Lilly Dillon in The Grifters.
But when she goes to work, a floor above us on the St George stage playing Smash’s stake-it-all Broadway producer Eileen Rand, the Huston we will see is a modern-day businesswoman emerging awkwardly from her husband’s infidelities.
It is a gutsy, showy role and one which involves the precise art of being able to toss a martini in a man’s face at the end of a dinner conversation with punctuational aplomb.
“It came to me so naturally, it was just like instinct,” she says about her newly acquired dexterity with a cocktail glass, “If only I’d known, I could have done it before now.”
She laughs richly again before moving to discuss how not everything about Smash has come as second nature.
The show captures the drama of mounting a Broadway musical. In this case, Bombshell, a song and dance dalliance on the life of Marilyn Monroe.
With Rand overseeing as producer, writer Julia Houston (Debra Messing), composer Tom Levitt (Christian Borle) and director Derek Wills (Jack Davenport) begin the search for the right actor to play Marilyn.
When casting narrows down to two wildly opposite choices – Ivy (Wicked‘s Megan Hilty) and Karen (American Idol 2006 runner-up Katharine McPhee) – it is time to cue the diva moments.
Working to a schedule which producers call “on feature film level”, the TV show’s cast travel constantly between three main sets scattered across New York. From the theatre, to Long Island City stages for interiors to a dance studio in Brooklyn – not to mention the multiple location shoots in Broadway restaurants and bars, loft apartments, on city boulevards and Times Square.
“It’s the regimen of doing this show episode after episode after episode, sometimes in tandem,” Huston says as to what the biggest adjustment has been, “and so relaxation really hasn’t been part of my life – even on the days that I don’t work – since I started this in August, September.”
Huston has had previous exposure to how TV works. In 1989 she was nominated for both an Emmy and Golden Globe for playing Clara in the mini-series Lonesome Dove; she has also had a seven-week arc in Medium and, among other things, voiced a cop in American Dad.
“For me, working for a camera, working with beautiful professionals who work at the top of their field – that’s what it is about for me,” she says. “TV (or) movies, it doesn’t matter. Even the screens are the same size now.”
Smash, Pay TV channel W, Monday, 9.30pm
