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From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

With her high cheekbones and piercing dark eyes, Huston was fated for success as a fashion model. As the daughter and granddaughter of film and stage royalty, she was also assured a career as an actress. How she fulfilled those dual destinies is the subject of the first in a planned two-volume memoir in which Huston delves into her past in stunning detail. Growing up on a sprawling Irish estate, Huston was in thrall to her famous director father John Huston's larger-than-life escapades and demands. As a teenager coming of age in London in the late 1960s, Huston fell under the spell of her passionately artistic prima-ballerina mother, Enrica Soma, who died just as Huston was coming into her own. Following that tragedy, the peripatetic Huston moved to New York where she captured the eye and captivated the attention of the day's leading fashion photographers, including the famously mercurial Bob Richardson. As a multitalented contributor to her family's theatrical legacy, Huston candidly reveals the heady and heartbreaking realities of life in that misconceived stratosphere.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist

Publishers Weekly
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Actress Huston achieves some moments of ringing clarity in this memoir of her youth, especially as regards her famous director father, John Huston, whom she was both terrified and in awe of (people "considered him a lion, a leader, the pirate they wished they had the audacity to be"). The daughter of his fourth wife, the dancer Ricki Soma (who was much younger than him), Anjelica Huston and her older brother, Tony, were raised in a remote 110-acre estate in West Country, Ireland, called St. Clerans, where being homeschooled; being visited by famous, quirky people; riding horses amid wildly romantic scenery; and playing dress-up filled her youth. Her father was frequently absent on far-flung shoots, and her exotic mother was "out of her element." With her parents' separation, Anjelica moved between Ireland and London, where her mother lived and where Anjelica went to school in the 1960s. She gradually embraced an acting career, appearing in her father's A Walk with Love and Death, though without confidence. After the death of her mother in 1969, Huston slipped into a more comfortable role of modeling and serving as the muse for the troubled, brilliant (and much older) fashion photographer Bob Richardson over four tortured years. Huston ends her brave account by describing her complex relationship with her father. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.