John Huston

John Huston was married five times, with four of his marriages ending in divorce. His first marriage to Dorothy Harvey lasted barely a year. His second and third marriages, to Lesley Black and Evelyn Louise Keyes, respectively, ended in divorce.

His fourth marriage was to Enrica Soma. This marriage also ran into trouble but the couple never divorced. Soma died in a car accident in 1969. His fifth and final marriage was to Celeste Shane which also ended in divorce like his first three marriages. He had several children from his marriages including daughter Anjelica Huston who grew up to be an actress and director.

He was a long term heavy smoker and suffered from emphysema. He died on August 28, 1987, at the age of 81.

John Marcellus Huston was born on August 5, 1906, in Nevada, Missouri, US, the only child of Rhea (née Gore) and Walter Huston. His mother was a newspaper reporter while his father was a flamboyant character actor of the stage. John began performing on stage with his father at age three.

His parents divorced when John was seven. Following their separation, he divided his time between traveling around the vaudeville circuit with his father and the country with his mother on reporting excursions.

As a teenager, he grew restless for adventure and quit school to pursue a more exciting life. Strong and well-built, he became a boxer and eventually won the Amateur Lightweight Boxing Championship of California, winning 22 of 25 bouts. A serious injury forced him to abandon boxing and he enrolled in Los Angeles' Smith School of Art to pursue painting.

Writing was another one of the talented young man’s passions and he worked as a journalist for the ‘New York Daily Graphic’ for a while before venturing into Hollywood looking for a position as a screenwriter.

He was employed by the Universal Studios, where his father was by then a star. John wrote dialogues for number of films in 1932, including ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘A House Divided’, and ‘Law and Order.’ During this time he accidentally killed a female pedestrian when the car he was driving struck her. Even though he was not legally implicated, the incident shook him to the core and he aimlessly drifted through life for the next five years.

He resolved to rebuild his career as a writer in 1937 and found a job as scriptwriter with Warner Brothers Studio. Over the next four years he co-wrote scripts for major films like ‘Jezebel’, ‘The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse’, ‘Juarez’, ‘Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet.’

He turned director in 1941 with the Dashiell Hammett's detective thriller, ‘The Maltese Falcon.’ The film starred Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, a hard-boiled detective. A huge hit, the film marked the beginning of Huston’s successful directorial career.

He served in the United States Army during World War II to make films for the Army Signal Corps. During his army career he directed and produced three films: ‘Report from the Aleutians’ (1943), ‘The Battle of San Pietro’ (1945), and ‘Let There Be Light’ (1946).

His film, ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’, a dramatic adventure western about two financially desperate Americans who prospect for gold in Mexico was a big commercial hit at the time of its release. In 1990, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

’Moulin Rouge,’ a drama film he directed, is counted among his most popular works. Set in Paris in the late 19th century, the film follows the life of artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the city's bohemian sub-culture in and around the burlesque palace, the Moulin Rouge.