Anjelica's heavenly voice

Anjelica Huston is taking part in the opening of the WB Yeats celebration in Dublin – the poet meant so much to her during her Irish childhood, and his work still moves her to tears

WILLIAM Butler Yeats may be dead seven decades but his words still retain the power to make actress Anjelica Huston cry. She is in Dublin for a public interview tonight at the opening of the National Library’s month-long celebration of Yeats’s work, Summer Wreath, and I have just asked her if she has a favourite Yeats poem.

"I loved different poems at different times," she explains. But there is one that has a specific significance for her. Her husband, the sculptor Robert Graham, who she was married to for 16 years, died in December 2008. At his funeral, Huston read Yeats's poem, He Bids His Beloved Be At Peace. It ends:

Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat

Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast,

Drowning love’s lonely hour in deep twilight of rest,

And hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous feet.

“It just said everything for me about a condition, that condition of love; of wishing peace on somebody,” she starts saying, thinking carefully about her words, and then suddenly she’s in tears, about which she is ruefully and needlessly apologetic.

She admits that being back in Ireland, where she spent a large part of her childhood, at the Georgian mansion of St Cleran’s near Craughwell in Co Galway, hits nerves for her. St Cleran’s, which was later became a hotel, is now for sale.

"I was last there a year ago. When I saw the house, it was all being packed up. The good news was that the house wasn't derelict, it had been kept warm and well-loved. The bad news was that every door I opened was a bedroom. Or a bathroom. It was a bit like being in Alice through the Looking Glass. All the function rooms were suddenly bedrooms or bedroom suites. Just like being in your own nightmare.

“I said at the time it was like Garbo in a bad dress: the bones of the house were there and very beautiful but the furnishings were different from my father’s day, and it’s very hard to accept change in places that you once were – I have a romantic eye to the past.”

Huston is dressed simply, in jeans and a blue shirt; the uniform of understatement. She thinks, out loud, her answers to questions, speaking in a low, sometimes hesitant voice but one that’s utterly compelling to listen to. It’s a voice layered with texture, as flexible as a piece of willow.

Then there’s the sharp, piercing look: the look that only people who can command a camera possess. It seems to promise that something important will happen, if you keep watching.

Huston made Oscar history by being the third generation of a family to receive that small gold statue. Her Oscar was for Prizzi's Honourin 1985, directed by her Oscar-winning father, John Huston. He also directed her in his last film, The Dead, in which she played Gretta Conroy. Among her many other other roles are Lilly Dillon in the Grifters, Morticia in The Addams Family, and Etheline Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums.

She talks philosophically about the contradiction that actresses face as they age: they have plenty of professional experience but the fact they are no longer young can exclude them from many roles.

“You have to be ready to ride the wave if you want to stay with it. Obviously as a younger actress, the parts are more apt to be leading. I was never a leading actress, I was always more of a character actress, I guess, even though I did leading roles. I rather enjoy that. I’m not unhappy with that.” She shrugs and smiles.

“I think women who occupy those lead roles do find it terribly hard when they gain a little age and they’re not the object of a man’s attraction. The parts do get smaller and, the older you get, the more character does come into the roles, and I think that’s OK, that’s fine. I take on various roles. That’s what I do.”

Growing up in Ireland gave her an interior landscape to access when she was far away. “I have extremely deep memories of the west. Of walking in the country in the west, under a fine rain. That feeling of this extraordinary vastness of the sky above your head and the vastness of nature. Of the deep calm of nature.

“In America, I’m used to sudden and extraordinary bursts of nature. Earthquakes! Floods! But there’s something about the solemnity of the west of Ireland in a fine rain that brings me right back to those earliest memories.”

Part of the reason she accepted the invitation to be part of the Yeats celebration is because she’s always been drawn to his work.

“I went to the Sisters of Mercy in Loughrea for a while as a day girl and it was there, I think, I first became aware of the poetry of WB Yeats. I knew his brother’s work, because Jack Yeats’ paintings hung in my father’s house. He was a great admirer of his work. I remember one that was a sort of celestial carousel, which was beautiful. And another one of the circus, an acrobat. I don’t know where they are now. My father sold his collection when he left Ireland, everything went.”

As a child of seven, she came across Yeats's The Song of Wandering Aengus, which fascinated her. "It was the first poem I ever memorised by myself and it was not a time when I voluntarily memorised anything. I remember being so struck by that poem and its imagery that I was sort of compelled to learn it. I grew up in the age just before television, so the spoken word, and singing and stories and poetry, were all part of my upbringing. The time wasn't so occupied by the drone of the television in those days."

She talks about the past and home again; the main home of her childhood, in Galway. “You can’t go home again, it’s absolutely true,” Huston says wistfully, looking down at her emerald engagement ring. She’s not only talking about a place, though. She’s also talking about her lost husband.

Suddenly she picks up her bag from the floor and takes out her phone. “Somebody sent me this piece this morning which I’m going to read to you,” she states with vigour. “It very much represents how I feel about things right now.” And she scrolls through her phone and does a mesmeric reading of these lines from Robert Louis Stevenson.

“The past, on the other baud, is lost for ever: our old days and deeds, our old selves, too, and the very world in which these scenes were acted, all brought down to the same faint residuum as a last night’s dream, to some incontinuous images, and an echo in the chambers of the brain. Not an hour, not a mood, not a glance of the eye, can we revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring. And yet conceive us robbed of it, conceive that little thread of memory that we trail behind us broken at the pocket’s edge; and in what naked nullity should we be left! For we only guide ourselves, and only know ourselves, by these air-painted pictures of the past.”

There is silence. “The air-painted pictures of the past,” the Oscar winner repeats softly.

Summer’s Wreath 2010, celebrating the work of WB Yeats, runs until Wednesday, June 30 at the National Library. All events are free but require tickets. Tonight, John Kelly interviews Anjelica Huston (cancellations only). Other participants this month include Germaine Greer, Mary O’Rourke, and Gavin Friday. nli.ie