John Huston, one of the most colorful and talented of all American film makers, died early Friday of emphysema at the age of 81.
The rugged director and actor, whose life proved as interesting as many of the characters he moved about the sets of his varied films, died in his sleep at a home he was renting in Newport, R. I., near the filming site of "Mr. North," his last picture.
Despite the debilitating effects of his respiratory problems, which had finally confined him to a wheelchair and a supply of oxygen, the hickory-tough Huston had continued to work.
In late July he began acting in "Mr. North," a script he co-authored with Janet Roach, who wrote his successful "Prizzi's Honor." The film was being directed on location in Newport by his son Danny, 25, with Huston's daughter Anjelica co-starring. When he fell ill, Huston asked his old friend Robert Mitchum to stand by, and then to take over the role.
Huston had completed directing his last feature, "The Dead," based on a James Joyce story from "Dubliners," earlier this year. It is to be released in November.
And in what proved a farewell public gesture, Huston, a lifelong smoker, in June filmed a television spot for the American Lung Assn. in which he praised "the courage of those fighting diseases of the lung."
Huston's career began with a brief fling as an actor, following in the footsteps of his father, Walter. But after working successfully as a staff writer at Warner Bros. in the late 1930s, he found his niche as a film maker with his first directing effort, "The Maltese Falcon," in 1941.
His films include such classics as "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," starring Humphrey Bogart and Huston's father as a salty old prospector, "The Asphalt Jungle," "Beat the Devil," "Moulin Rouge," "Key Largo," "Red Badge of Courage," "The African Queen," "Night of the Iguana," "Fat City" and "The Man Who Would Be King," a great commercial success with Michael Caine and Sean Connery in the Kipling story.
The range of Huston's interests, and achievements, was reflected in such offbeat films as "Wise Blood," a story about religious obsession adapted from a Flannery O'Connor novella, and "Under the Volcano," a critically admired but commercially unsuccessful telling of a Malcolm Lowry novel about the last day of a British expatriate in Mexico.
Big Success With 'Prizzi'
"Prizzi's Honor" in 1985, both a critical and box office success, was vintage Huston--tough, funny and characterful, a darkly comic tale (from a Richard Condon novel) of loyalties in a crime family. He was nominated for an Academy Award as best director. Daughter Anjelica, who co-starred with Jack Nicholson in the film, won an Oscar as best supporting actress for her performance. Her grandfather Walter had won as supporting actor for "Sierra Madre" many years before.
Huston was named the 1983 recipient of the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. It was the latest in a long series of honors that included Oscar nominations not only as a director but as a writer and an actor. He won two Academy Awards, for writing and directing "Sierra Madre." He was given the prestigious Laurel Award of the Writers Guild in 1964 and was the subject of an homage at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979.
A tall, thunder-voiced man who had been an amateur boxing champion in his teens and later an officer in the Mexican cavalry, Huston seemed part hell-raiser and part courtly gallant.
In 1945 he had a widely reported no-decision fistfight with Errol Flynn at David O. Selznick's house, possibly over Flynn's estranged wife Nora Eddington, whom Huston was escorting.
Huston himself was married five times and in his autobiography, "An Open Book," said that his wives were, in order, "a schoolgirl, a gentlewoman, a movie star, a ballerina and a crocodile."
Asked once how he would change his life if he had it to do again, Huston said, "I would spend more time with my children. I would make my money instead of spending it. I would learn the joys of wine instead of hard liquor. I would not smoke cigarettes when I had pneumonia. I would not marry the fifth time."
Became Irish Citizen
In 1964 he became a citizen of Ireland, where he had lived since 1952, but gave up his country estate there in 1978, explaining that "it cost me so much to live there that I had to stay away and work all the time to afford it." He lived most of his later years at a remote house in Mexico that was reachable only by water and leased from Indians. His house companions were said to include two boa constrictors and an ocelot.
