Anjelica Huston and Jack Nicholson had a famously fraught relationship that ended dramatically.
The couple had been together for 17 years and Anjelica put up with a lot of infidelity on Jack’s part until she couldn’t take it anymore!
It was in 2014 that Anjelica Huston revealed details about her long-time relationship with veteran actor Jack Nicholson. Huston wrote a memoir titled “Watch Me.”
One of the tidbits in the book included Huston’s interaction with then 12-year-old Gwenyth Paltrow who told Huston that Jack Nicholson scared her to which Huston replied, “With good reason. He scares me, too.”
The torrid love affair began in 1973 when Anjelica Huston was invited to a party at Jack Nicholson’s home. The couple immediately hit it off and Anjelica even spent the night at Jack’s place.
The two made plans to meet up again in a few days but nearer to the plan, Nicholson ended up canceling, saying he had prior commitments he had to honor.
She would much later find out that the ‘prior commitment’ had been with Michelle Phillips, a popular vocalist from the group ‘The Mamas and the Papas’. She explained in her memoir that Jack’s clandestine meetings with other women remained a pattern throughout their 17 years together.
Anjelica Huston mentions tender moments of love the couple shared in her memoir too but she heavily focused on the torrid moments which drove her into frenzies. Huston quickly realized that all women; whether old friends or new ones were threats to her relationship because Jack had a pattern of infidelity.
But regardless of the infidelity, Anjelica believed in her heart that she and Nicholson would end up married. She was convinced it would happen someday until she mentioned this belief to Jack who disillusioned her immediately by replying with,”Marry you? Are you kidding?”
In her memoir, Anjelica recalls that she cried for three days after this.
But in the past Nicholson has made different claims. In a 1980 interview with People magazine, while the couple was still together, Nicholson said, “I ask her to get married all the time,” adding, “sometimes she turns me down, sometimes she says yes. We don’t get around to it.”
Jack was not one to be careful when it came to cheating. Anjelica Huston would often find evidence of other women having been to his home. She writes of the incidents, “Occasionally, I’d find a piece of female apparel — once a jacket of mine turned up on a girl in the street — or I’d find some hand cream, or a trinket might get left behind in the soap dish. Sometimes I’d take to wearing the jewelry to see if anybody would come up and claim it, but that never happened.”
But the nail in the coffin came years later when Jack Nicholson revealed something to Anjelica Huston.
It was in 1990 that Nicholson revealed to Huston that he had fathered a child with another woman. This seemed to be the breaking point for their relationship since Anjelica did not take the news well at all.
A few days later after Nicholson told her about the other woman’s pregnancy, Anjelica drove to the Paramount Pictures lot where Nicholson was filming a project.
She then attacked the actor. In her memoir, she writes “He was coming out of the bathroom when I attacked him. I don’t think I kicked him, but I beat him savagely about the head and shoulders. He was ducking and bending, and I was going at him like a prizefighter, raining a vast array of direct punches.”
A few days after her attack on Jack Nicholson, she received a call from him where he told her she had left bruises on his body because of the attack. The two were able to laugh about the incident, which surprised the actress.
The two then met years later when they were both cast in the same project. Jack compared their love to the relationship in “Love in the Time of Cholera,” a comparison that Huston loved.
Huston wrote of his comparison, “that is one of my favorite books, by one of my favorite authors, about one of my favorite subjects — hopeless, enduring love.”
Their love affair was one that was long and fraught with tension throughout. But it seems the duo now carries no ill-will against one another.
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