Hollywood Memorial

An eccentric rebel of epic proportions, this Hollywood titan reigned supreme as director, screenwriter and character actor in a career that endured over five decades. The ten-time Oscar-nominated legend He was one of the ‘greats’ of Hollywood’s golden age. He was one of Bogart’s best friends and directed him in such film classics such as ‘The Maltese Falcon’, ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’, “Key Largo” and ‘The African Queen’. Huston also directed ‘The Misfits’, which co-starred Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in their last film. Also acting in ‘Chinatown’ opposite Jack Nicholson in his Oscar Winning performance. He and his father Walter Huston are the first father-son couple to be Oscar-nominated the same year (1941) and the first to win the same year (1949). He also directed his daughter, Angelica Huston, to Oscar glory in the mob tale Prizzi’s Honor. (Angelica met Jack Nicholson while on set with her father during the Chinatown shoot, lived with Nicholson for a decade and co-starred with him in ‘Prizzi’s Honor’ and ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’.) They are the first family to have three generations of Oscar winners, the second family is the Coppolas: Francis Ford Coppola, Sofia Coppola, Nicolas Cage and Carmine Coppola. Huston was a licensed pilot…and a prankster. He once flew over a golf course and dropped 5,000 ping-pong balls while a celebrity golf tournament was in progress. Huston wrote a somewhat sanitized autobiography in 1980 (friends who read it said, ‘Good book, John – who’s it about?’). At one time he kept a pet monkey. His wife of the time, Evelyn Keyes, became fed up with the noise and the mess and told Huston that either she or the monkey would have to leave. ‘Honey,’ replied Huston, ‘it’s you!’ He was once called ‘the eccentric’s eccentric’ by Paul Newman. Huston was married five times and is buried with his Mother at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. He is also the former father-in-law of Chicago’s own Oscar-winning actress Virginia Madsen.