‘When the chips are down, he’s there,’ Oscar-winning actress says of former partner
Anjelica Huston has revealed that her old flame, Jack Nicholson, checked in on her as wildfires raged through Los Angeles last month.
Huston and Nicholson, 87, dated on and off from 1973 to 1990 and starred in three movies together — Prizzi’s Honor (which was directed by Huston’s father John), The Last Tycoon, and The Postman Always Rings Twice — during that time.
After the two split, they worked together once again, co-starring in 1995’s The Crossing Guard, which was directed by Nicholson’s pal Sean Penn.
“I loved him,” she said. “I think in the world that I was living in, it wasn’t disrespectful. It was how he was, and it wasn’t so personal. I think as soon as I clocked that, it was all right, I knew how to protect myself. It didn’t make me happy, but I knew what I was doing.”
The actress went on to describe herself as confident and independent during their nearly two-decade romance.
“I did what I wanted to do, and I did it with sureness,” she said. “If I wanted something, I knew how to go after it, so it wasn’t as though anything was being done to me. I wasn’t a wilting flower.”
In an excerpt from her second memoir Watch Me, which was published in 2014, Huston opened up on the night she found out Nicholson had impregnated another woman (model/actress Rebecca Broussard) while they were still together.
After Nicholson told Huston he was going to stand by the pregnancy, Huston replied: “There’s only room for one of us women in this picture, and I am going to retire from it.”
She later recounted how she attacked him when an article appeared in Playboy shortly after their split that quoted a young woman who said Nicholson “playfully spanked her with a Ping-Pong paddle.”
Days afterwards, Huston said the pair “laughed” about the fight. “’Goddamn, Toots, you sure landed some blows on me. I’m bruised all over my body,’” the Oscar-winning actress remembered him saying.
After they reunited for The Crossing Guard, there was a period of awkwardness between the two. But Huston recalled in her book how Nicholson said to her, “‘You and me, Toots — we’re like Love in the Time of Cholera.’”
“That is one of my favourite books, by one of my favourite authors, about one of my favourite subjects — hopeless, enduring love,” she wrote.
Huston went on to marry sculptor Robert Graham in 1992 and the two were together until he died in 2008.
Meanwhile, after his relationship with Broussard, with whom he had two children — Lorraine and Ray — ended, Nicholson went on to date Twin Peaks actress Lara Flynn Boyle. But he never found another long-term partner.
Earlier this month, Nicholson made a rare public appearance wearing a New York Yankees beret as he introduced Adam Sandler during Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary special.
Her post followed a social media photo she shared of the actor in January commemorating her past year.
“The giving season,” Lorraine captioned the post.
