The Daily Beast: "Smash: Anjelica Huston on Her Husband’s Death, Her New Role, and Whether She’ll Sing"
It is impossible to miss Anjelica Huston when she walks into a room.
In this case, the room was the bar at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, California, a few hours before Huston was set to take the stage before a ballroom of television critics at the TCA Winter Press Tour to answer questions for her new show, the Broadway-set drama Smash, which premieres Monday on NBC.
With her raven Cleopatra cut, an armful of gently clanging bracelets, and her impressive height, Huston is unlikely to get lost in a crowd, but her considerable talents as an actress render that an impossibility. As she slinked into a club chair on a gray January morning, she exuded a sense of serenity and warmth that is deeply at odds with the troubled characters she often plays.
“Were you one of those kids I scared to death?” she asked, when the topic of The Witches arose; Huston starred in the 1990 adaption of Roald Dahl’s novel as The Grand High Witch, Miss Eva Ernst, and terrified a generation of young moviegoers when she removed her face to reveal a grotesque monster beneath the placid façade.
The Academy Award-winning actress, perhaps best known for her roles in The Royal Tenenbaums, The Addams Family, and Prizzi’s Honor, is no stranger to television—she starred in miniseries such as CBS’s Lonesome Dove, HBO’s Iron Jawed Angels, TNT’s The Mists of Avalon, and appeared in a seven-episode story arc on Medium in 2008—but it is the first time that she has taken on a series regular role. In the backstage Broadway world of Smash, Huston plays producer Eileen Rand, whose divorce from her lecherous husband has not only resulted in the freezing of her assets but the awakening of her sense of righteous vengeance.
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Smash premieres tonight at 10 pm ET/PT on NBC.