Dark Angel

The movie's reception in 1969 did not make it a humiliation worth suffering. Most reviews were sufficiently savage to prompt Huston's apology on David Frost's television show, where she proclaimed herself ''no good, awful.''

But the failure of the movie was nothing in comparison to learning, shortly before its opening, that her mother had been killed at age 39 in a car accident in France. ''It was devastating,'' Huston says of the period. ''I was very fragile and extremely unbalanced by the time that whole outing was completed.''

Huston moved to New York, understudied the role of Ophelia in a Broadway production of Hamlet, and began modeling for Vogue, among other magazines. In 1973 she moved to Los Angeles, met Nicholson at a party, and soon moved in with him. Then, ''very slowly, very tentatively,'' she began to get back into the family business, doing plays, a few episodes of Laverne & Shirley, small movie parts.

Although her acting was consistently solid, her roles tended to be very low-profile — until Prizzi's Honor. After working with her in 1984's The Ice Pirates, a not-too-widely seen space-movie spoof, producer John Foreman suggested her for the role of Maerose to her father, who was set to direct Prizzi. Nicholson then came on board as her ex-boyfriend, the weaselly hit man who gets involved with a stunning hit woman (Kathleen Turner). Making the movie was ''a very pleasant experience for everyone concerned,'' Huston remembers. ''It was a family affair.'' And when Anjelica won her Oscar, John Huston became the only director to guide both his father (Walter Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) and his daughter in Academy Award-winning performances.

As an adult, Huston developed stronger bonds with her father, both professionally and personally. In 1987 the clan reassembled in Valencia, Calif., to shoot The Dead, directed by John from a screenplay by Tony (adapted from the James Joyce story). But that acclaimed production was to be John's last. Several months later, the family got together again in Newport, R.I., where half-brother Danny was to direct Anjelica, their father, and their half-sister Allegra (Ricki's daughter by Lord Norwich) in Mr. North, a film based on a Thornton Wilder novel. Anjelica, who was playing a mysterious and enchanting divorcee, says it had the potential of being ''the funnest movie ever.'' But at the last minute John, who had been in and out of hospitals with emphysema and other respiratory ailments for several years, became too ill to play the family patriarch and Robert Mitchum was called in to take his place. Shortly after his 81st birthday, Huston died in a rented home near the set. ''That was a brutal time,'' says Anjelica, a deep inhalation the only crack in her composure.

''I remember the first time I saw her after John died,'' says Buck. ''Her eyes, which used to be hazel, had turned brown. And they've stayed that way.''

Not long after her father's death, Huston's relationship with Nicholson headed into the homestretch. For 17 years the couple had lived together, split up, lived in separate houses, and reconciled. But in late 1989, in a real-life echo of Enemies, A Love Story, which she'd just completed filming, she learned that Nicholson was having a child with an actress-waitress named Rebecca Broussard. Then, in the December 1989 Playboy, a British starlet gave a graphic description of the affair she'd had with Nicholson. Huston and Nicholson split for good this time, but Huston, who no longer sees or speaks to Nicholson, handled the affair with her usual aplomb.

''If you don't have anything particularly great to say, why say anything?'' she says. ''I don't think it would have done him or me any good for me to have taken public umbrage.''

During a recent vacation in Europe, Huston and Mexico-born sculptor Robert Graham, 52, whom she began dating a year and a half ago, were engaged. ''I think everyone should be married once,'' she cracks. The Venice, Calif.-based Graham, best known for his controversial nude bronze figures, which were commissioned for L.A.'s 1984 Olympics, proposed at Ireland's Dromoland Castle. ''It had been a long day on the Irish countryside, walking on the Burren, going to a pub with friends,'' says Huston. ''We'd just gotten into Dromoland and he threw this box down on the bed and said, 'So, do you want to get married?''' Along with a ring, Graham presented her with a pair of ceremonial knives. ''You know,'' Huston explains dryly, ''to cut each other's hearts out if things don't work out.''

Assuming they do, Huston hopes to have children. ''I love kids,'' she says. ''I'm tremendously jealous when I'm around other people's.'' She's also planning to direct a movie about the life of Maud Gonne MacBride, an English actress and Irish patriot whom she calls ''the Joan of Arc of Ireland.'' Born into celebrity, Huston seems unfazed by the growing intensity of her own. She works at her own pace, choosing the projects that appeal to her — whether it's touring through flea markets, gardening, or making a movie. And, as the MacBride project indicates, she follows her own instincts, not Hollywood's. ''I haven't become any different,'' says Huston with a laugh. ''I've just become older.''