Watch Me
A Memoir
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4.1 • 75 Ratings
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Academy Award-winning actress Huston’s “tireless fascination with the world is thrilling…” (Elle), and Watch Me is an “elegant and entertaining” (Chicago Tribune) account of her seventeen-year love affair with Jack Nicholson, her rise to stardom, and her mastery of the craft of acting.
Picking up where her first memoir A Story Lately Told leaves off, Watch Me is a chronicle of Anjelica Huston’s glamorous and eventful Hollywood years. “With a conversational intimacy, inhabiting the role of the new best friend” (San Francisco Chronicle), she writes about falling in love with Jack Nicholson and her adventurous, turbulent, high-profile, spirited relationship with him and his intoxicating circle of friends. She writes about learning how to act; about her Academy Award-winning portrayal of Maerose Prizzi in Prizzi’s Honor; about her collaborations with many of the greatest directors in Hollywood, including Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Richard Condon, Bob Rafelson, Mike Nichols, and Stephen Frears. She movingly and beautifully describes the death of her father John Huston and her marriage to sculptor Robert Graham. She is candid, mischievous, warm, passionate, funny, and a fabulous storyteller. Watch Me is a magnificent memoir “from a lady so simultaneously real, tough, vulnerable, privileged and candid, I want to hear whatever she tells me” (Lisa Schwarzbaum, The New York Times Book Review).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An insecure girl makes herself into an Oscar-winning actress in this captivating memoir. Following up on her well-received coming-of-age memoir A Story Lately Told, Huston recounts her decades-long passage from callow runway model to breakout roles in Prizzi's Honor, The Grifters and The Addams Family and accomplished directing stints. The narrative centers on her turbulent relationships with two larger-than-life men: her father, John Huston, a legendary director and alternately supportive and hyper-critical dad; and her long-time boyfriend, the movie star Jack Nicholson, who in her description veers between ebullient charisma, cold callousness and heartless womanizing. (Brazenly propositioned by a Frenchwoman at Cannes, Nicholson allegedly zoomed off on her motorbike, leaving Huston in tears on the sidewalk.) The author is candid about the self-doubts that often held her back, which makes her professional blossoming all the more interesting. The book's real triumph is in her bewitching prose, which features vivid profiles of innumerable dropped names, wonderfully impressionistic sketches of showbiz scenes and poetic evocations of happiness and loss, especially in her simple, luminous account of the death of her husband, the sculptor Robert Graham. Huston again proves herself a sensitive writer and a born raconteur. Photos.
Customer Reviews
Another Legacy Celebrity Bio, But Not Bad
When I was a young person, I did not realize how many celebrities were the offspring or descendants of other celebrities. These stories are usually similar, in that the person born on third base generally attributes their success to hitting a triple rather than proximity to an already established celebrity. It's a bubble mentality that is always off-putting. Names are dropped so continuously that it gets boring. Words like "brilliant" get thrown around way too much -- these self-regarding people are not Einsteins. The need for celebrity offspring to "prove" themselves is always an element of these stories, even though any number of non-connected people probably could have done the job as well, given the chance. All actors do is pretend to be someone else, in a culture that values fame more than the real people (if it's a true story) who do the things being portrayed. This is probably the last celebrity bio I will ever read.
All that said, there was something to like here, a certain honesty and vulnerability that comes from someone who shares the insecurities we all have despite her privileged perch. A high fashion model who did not think herself pretty enough, even though she was objectively crazy-gorgeous. A woman who has trouble with men because of a sometimes remote father who cheated on her mother, a mother who died too young. A woman who loved certain men even though they gave her less devotion than she deserved. Humiliation at the hands of abusive and faithless lovers. True love and contentment at last with an artist husband at the age of 40. Family and loss. Love of animals and dear friends and home.
And Anjelica Huston has turned in some truly good performances in Prizzi's Honor; the Addams Family movies; and The Grifters. So there's that.
So this bio, unlike some others, operated at two levels. A very satisfying, emotionally honest level; and then the other strangely self-deceptive level that people born to the already famous seem to have.
If it were true that the offspring of the famous had to prove themselves and had no leg up, then fully half of our actor/celebrity class would not be children of the already famous and connected. Gwyneth Paltrow. Michael Douglas. Keifer Sutherland. Liv Tyler. Kate Hudson. Drew Barrymore. Dakota Johnson. Colin Hanks. Jamie Lee Curtis. Jane Fonda. Peter Fonda. Bridget Fonda. Jennifer Aniston. Angelina Jolie. The rest of the Huston clan. Sigourney Weaver. The list goes on. And I haven't even included several who readily come to mind who have already passed.
Once, a semi-famous actress told me, a lawyer, that it was more difficult to play a lawyer on TV than it was to actually be a lawyer. OMG. This is right up there with Gwyneth Paltrow's pronouncement that her life was harder than that of a working mother trapped in some exhausting, soul killing 8-5 job that barely pays anything.
So I'm done with celebrity bios, and especially legacy celebrity bios. I give this one four stars for honesty and vulnerability. But I don't feel like I need to read another such tome ever.
YET ANOTHER AP THAT'S TOTALLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE
HOW THE BLOODY HEAD DO WE ACTUALLY READ ONE OF THE CUPCAKED DELIVETED BOOKS? We hit "Lincoln Center". A number of books or mags is "shelved". It says "To read free return to Lincoln Center. So, I do. It's looks exactly a it did previously. I "hit" it again and go AGAIN to the shelved books. "To reD free return to...", so I do. THEN WHAT? I can go back and forth until my back hair grows back in, but how, once BACK at Lincoln Centr Does one read it's shelved material for free? There is NO link. NO hel or instructions. Why are they keeping it a SECTET from us? No fair! And, yet ANOTHER ap making promises it then makes it impossible, without additional information, to TRUCKING ACCESS! What gives? Or, more accurately, what DOESN'T?
Fun and real
She is explicit without being vulgar and tells the truth as she remembers. I don't think readers can ask for more than that.