''I hear a lot of that late-bloomer stuff,'' Anjelica Huston says, sipping an afternoon Bloody Mary in the lounge of L.A.'s Four Seasons Hotel and lighting one in a series of cigarettes. ''But I don't remember being all that aware of Jessica Lange or Meryl Streep or Glenn Close in their teens.'' At the age of 40, when many actresses are starting on a downhill slope, Huston is hitting her wickedly long-legged stride. ''I think it's fair to say things came together for me in my 30s,'' she says, giving a tug on a tight-fitting miniskirt that's beating a retreat up her thighs, ''but that doesn't mean that's when everything happened to me. An actor's life is a series of progressions, and you get to do different things at different times.''
And different things are what Huston does best. Her current role as the elegantly campy Morticia in the smash hit The Addams Family is only the latest departure in a career studded with them. ''I usually do what I like,'' Huston says, cocking one semi-circular brow over her Modigliani features. ''That's the one thing that ties everything in.'' In the decade since she began to be taken seriously as an actress, she has played a lion tamer, a Washington Post reporter, a mafioso's daughter, a child-hating coven leader, a Nazi concentration camp survivor, and a hardened hustler. The common thread has been her intensity, an ability to reveal startling depths of passion, anguish, bitterness, or humor.
''Anjelica has a great vulnerability,'' says Martin Landau, who costarred with Huston in Crimes and Misdemeanors. ''She's had her share of pain, and she's able to tap into that when she works.''
Huston's most wrenching roles have always been her most successful. In 1986, she received an Academy Award for her portrayal of Maerose, the calmly vengeful mob daughter in Prizzi's Honor, directed by her father, John Huston, and starring her then boyfriend, Jack Nicholson. She got another nomination for 1989's Enemies, A Love Story, playing a woman who survives the Holocaust only to discover that her husband has remarried and has both a pregnant wife and a mistress. Last spring she was nominated a third time for her portrayal of Lily, the hard-bitten, platinum-blond con artist in The Grifters, Stephen Frears' grim tale of small-time hustlers.
Compared with such emotionally draining fare, Morticia is a virtual vacation, and that is exactly what Huston had in mind. ''The Grifters was extremely satisfying, but very hard on the heart,'' she says. ''So I was in the mood to do something that didn't call for quite so much pain.''
On the set, even when the camera isn't rolling, Huston is Morticia incarnate. Her dress, a black, floor-length number with filmy cuffs that look like old spiderwebs, skates along an impossibly taut hourglass figure. And she doesn't so much walk as float, gravestone-gray eye shadow forming batwing arches on her ghoulishly pale face. Huston's sardonic humor is sprinkled like fairy dust over this $30 million undertaking, which gives Charles Addams' psychically skewed family its first stab at film. ''Much more than the other actors, Anjelica was involved with the whole gestalt of the movie,'' says director Barry Sonnenfeld. ''She's very bright and she always made sure I wasn't taking the easy way out.'' As the doting housewife, a perversely sensual loving mother, Huston luxuriates on her very own torture rack and smiles benevolently as her little darlings play with lightning rods or electric chairs.
''Morticia has a shape only a cartoonist can draw,'' says Sonnenfeld, ''so we lashed Anjelica into a metal corset that created this hips-and-waist thing I've never seen any woman have in reality.'' Huston also got daily gauze eye lifts, neck tucks, and fake nails. ''Come afternoon, I could be prone to a really good headache from my various bondages,'' she says. ''And because I couldn't lie down (in the corset) or rest, it was fairly exhausting.''
''Anjelica's got Morticia down,'' says costar Raul Julia, who plays her enthusiastically infatuated husband, Gomez. ''I see her as a perfect Norman Rockwell mother,'' Huston says. ''Just taken to a very dark degree.''
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