This striking, darkhaired actress made an inauspicious film debut in 1969's A Walk With Love and Death directed by her famous father, John Huston, and played in two other films that same year-Sinful Davey (also directed by her dad) and Hamlet-before vanishing from the screen for many years and appearing only sporadically for many years after that. She surprised everybodycritics, audiences, movie-industry typeswith her sly performance in 1985's brilliant black comedy Prizzi's Honor (again, directed by her father), which won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Since then she's limned many fine characters in a string of meritorious movies with varying box-office success. She earned additional Academy Award nominations as Ron Silver's long-lost wife in Enemies, A Love Story (1989) and as John Cusack's amoral mom in The Grifters (1990).

Huston was perfectly cast as the sinister but svelte Morticia Addams in The Addams Family (1991) and its 1993 sequel, Addams Family Values She teamed up with Jack Nicholson for The Crossing Guard (1995). As if to prove she could play women of a non-exotic nature as well, she starred in the outstanding 1993 miniseries "Family Pictures," following a woman's life over several decades through her relationship with her husband and children. In truth, Huston has little to prove; she has become one of the screen's finest, most original actresses.