Don't waste time on what's not important. Don't get sucked into the drama. Get on with it: don't dwell on the past. Be a big person; be generous of spirit; be the person you'd admire.
Allegra Huston
I look at 'Love Child' and it's as if it was written by someone else - someone who knew what they were doing.
I, personally, have had to rise above my feelings of inferiority to my sister Anjelica, not to mention feeling sorry for myself because I lost my mother so young.
I see myself as part English and part American, with a dash of Irish thrown in, and a pinch of Italian from my mother's ancestry.
When I was 12 and met my real father for the first time, I was terrified I would lose the one I already had.
If you have security, you can rebel; if you don't, you hold on to any scraps of it that you have.
What I am most grateful for is that neither of my fathers pushed the relationship; they just let things develop and didn't impose anything on me. They were both just there, emanating stability in a very unstable situation.
With my stepson, it is very important to me that there is no drama around the fact that he has two families.
Because Dad was famous, I was so used to being identified as 'John Huston's daughter' that I couldn't think of myself as anyone else.
I was not a Southern California girl. I hated having my photograph taken. I felt shy and embarrassed around famous people.
I loved Dad more for treating the biological reality as trivial, irrelevant. He loved me no less than his other three children.
The most important thing in convoluted families, I learnt as I wrote, is that the child feels loved. I knew from a young age that I was a problem which required constant solving; but I never felt unloved. I was lucky.
Losing one's mother to a car crash at age four isn't a readily accessible idea of good luck, but I've come to accept it as the condition that was required for my luck to fall into place.
When I moved to London at age 16, tired of the shuffle around other people's houses and ready to live on my own, I met my English brother and sister, who instantly claimed me as family.
I was a supporting character in other people's lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.
