The actress, at 62, looks back on her childhood and early modeling career.

Anjelica Huston has lived a big, colorful life — big and colorful enough to fill two volumes of an autobiography.

 

The first, A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London and New York (Scribner), goes on sale Tuesday. It begins with her unconventional childhood and ends when she has started modeling and is in a deeply troubled relationship with fashion photographer Bob Richardson.
"It's funny," says the actress, who has won an Oscar, famously made the Hollywood scene with Jack Nicholson, and most recently made a splash (literally, as cocktail-tossing producer Eileen Rand) on the now-canceled NBC series Smash.
"There are times in one's life when people start to ask you questions, like, 'When are you going to have a baby?' " says Huston, 62, who never had a child. "And in this case, it was, 'When are you going to write your book?' This idea cropped up quite a lot, particularly in the last four or five years since my husband's death, and I think actually it's been very cathartic."
Huston, who laughs easily and often, is calling from Venice, Calif., where she lives with a menagerie of cats and dogs. Her husband of 16 years, sculptor Robert Graham, died in 2008.
On this day at the beach, she reports, the sky has "that blank look that skies take on in November in California, where it's not sunny but it's not anything else either."