The lineage is impressive. Walter Huston’s son was legendary writer-director-actor John Huston. And John Huston begat an Oscar-winning daughter, Anjelica and sons Danny and Tony, respected actor and writer, respectively.
Walter Huston Born Near Toronto, Canada
Walter Huston’s movie career began in 1929, more than 20 years after a long apprenticeship as a barnstorming vaudevillian and eventual Broadway star. His formal stage career began on a rather sour note. In his first important role, Huston played a messenger in Richard Mansfield’s 1902 production of Julius Caesar. But stage fright hit hard, Huston forgot his four lines and was fired.
Walter Huston, who played so many thoroughly American parts, was actually a Canadian of Scottish and Irish heritage. He was born Walter Houghston in 1883 (some sources say 1884) in York County, Ontario, the son of a farmer who later started a construction business.
He grew up in Toronto, playing hooky, doing impressions and eventually hitting the road with a stock company. It was a rough and tumble life on the road that lasted years.
Groucho Marx Story of Unforgettable Train Ride With Walter Huston
On the last day of 1904, the 21-year-old vaudeville veteran married newspaperwoman Rhea Gore, whom he had met that year at the St. Louis World’s Fair. The bride, a sportswriter, was keenly interested in horse racing and gambling. She passed these interests on to their son, John, born in 1906 in Nevada while Walter Huston was working at the other great passion in his life – engineering.
But the foray into engineering was brief, ending when his attempts to correct a town reservoir nearly resulted in a massive flood. He returned to performing, which he loved, in 1909. That year, he partnered in a vaudeville act with a woman named Bayonne Whipple. (Groucho Marx reportedly once claimed to have been kept awake on a train by the sounds of Walter Huston making love to a woman in the lower berth. It’s assumed the woman was Whipple.)
Huston’s marriage to Rhea broke up in 1913; he married Whipple two years later.
Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms a Big Hit For Huston
In 1924, Huston snagged his first important Broadway role with Mr. Pitt. He reportedly had help from his sister, Margaret, a former opera singer who offered voice and diction lessons. Over the next five years, Huston’s reputation grew in a succession of New York shows, including the original production of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms.
In 1929, Walter Huston tried his hand in a newfangled thing called talking pictures. He made his debut as a morally-challenged newspaper reporter in the now-forgotten Gentlemen of the Press. The following year, he played the title role in the disappointingly wooden Abraham Lincoln, D.W. Griffith’s first talkie.
Better movies awaited. Huston was a good-hearted Depression-era banker in Frank Capra’s American Madness. He co-starred with Joan Crawford in 1932’s Rain. And he starred in one of the strangest political movies ever, Gabriel Over the White House, as a corrupt politician transformed by supernatural means into a righteous president. The film was produced by William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures.
Walter Huston Earns First Oscar Nomination for Dodsworth
Most significantly, he reprised his 1934 Broadway role as the eponymous Dodsworth, about an American industrialist whose life is transformed during a disastrous tour of Europe. Rarely in the ‘30s were sex and love treated more maturely than in director William Wyler’s 1936 drama. The performance earned Huston the first of four Oscar nominations.
In 1938, Huston was back on Broadway. In Knickerbocker Holiday, he played 17th century New Amsterdam governor Peter Stuyvesant. The role called for him to sing the bittersweet ballad September Song. The tune later was featured in the terrific 1950 romance September Affair.
John Huston's The Maltese Falcon Features Father Walter Huston in Brief Cameo Appearance
By 1941, Huston’s son, now a top screenwriter, made his directorial debut. John Huston cast his father as the dying Capt. Jacobi, who silently delivers the notorious (and eventually proven fake) Maltese Falcon to Humphrey Bogart. It was a nice in-joke, since Walter Huston hung his head during his few seconds onscreen and was virtually unrecognizable.
The decade was good to Walter Huston. Also in '41, he earned a best actor Oscar nomination for The Devil and Daniel Webster. The next year, he was nominated again, this time for supporting actor as James Cagney’s father in the George M. Cohan biography Yankee Doodle Dandy. A year after that, he appeared in The Outlaw, Howard Hughes’ cheesy western paean to Jane Russell’s cleavage. Other pictures included Mission to Moscow, the moody period piece Dragonwyck with Gene Tierney and Vincent Price and the David O. Selznick potboiler Duel in the Sun.
John Huston Directs Father Walter Huston to Oscar in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Seven years after The Maltese Falcon, father and son reunited for John Huston’s landmark story of greed, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. John directed his father to a best supporting actor Oscar and picked up two Academy Awards for himself, for his direction and screenplay. At the ceremony, an effusive Walter Huston told the audience, “Many years ago – many, many years ago, I brought up a boy, and I said to him, ‘Son, if you ever become a writer, try to write a good part for your old man sometime.’ Well, by cracky, that’s what he did!”
Off screen, Walter Huston’s second marriage, to Bayonne Whipple, had broken up in 1931. That same year he married actress Ninette “Nan” Sunderland, with whom he later co-starred on Broadway in Othello. The marriage lasted the final 19 years of Huston’s life, although by some accounts was very troubled.
In 1950, Walter Huston died in Beverly Hills of an aortic aneurysm, the day after his 66th birthday. After his death, the actor’s recording of September Song became a staple of radio's Hit Parade and today is a standard. And in a biography of the Huston family, author Lawrence Grobel reported Walter Huston’s ashes went unclaimed for more than two decades. Grobel claims John Huston finally tracked his father’s remains to a Manhattan funeral home and buried them at Walter Ranch in Porterville, California.
After Nan Huston’s death in 1973, John Huston moved his father’s ashes to Nan’s grave in Fresno, California.
Barry M. Grey - Barry M. Grey is a non-fiction TV writer-producer in Los Angeles whose love of classic film borders on the dangerously obsessive.
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