Anjelica Huston

Born: July 8th 1951
Where: Los Angeles, California

The former model is a fully paid up member of the Hollywood aristocracy with winning turns in Prizzi's Honour and The Grifters.

However, she will always be remembered for the creepy role of Mortica in the big screen version of The Addams Family.

Offscreen, she will also be known as the long-term companion of Jack Nicholson from 1973 to 1989.

Brought up in rural Ireland, she had a privileged but disturbed childhood - her father John Huston did not want her to become an actress.

Instead, despite parts in Sinful Davy and A Walk With Love and Death, she worked as a model and returned to New York after the death of her ballerina mother.

Returning to movies in the 1980s, she landed an Oscar as the vengeful girlfriend of hitman Jack Nicholson in Prizzi's Honour.

Representing the third generation of Hustons to win an Academy Award, she finally emerged from the shadows of father John and Nicholson to carve a career of her own.

After playing a witch opposite Michael Jackson in Francis Ford Coppola's 3-D fantasy short Captain Eo, Huston tackled her first leading role in Coppola's disappointing Gardens Of Stone.

Prizzi's Honor had brought father and daughter closer together, and building on that, she starred as a romantic Irish wife trapped in a loveless marriage for his final directing effort, The Dead.

Over the next few years, Huston became established as a terrific character actress, taking a series of visceral parts in films.

These included Woody Allen's Crimes & Misdemeanors and Enemies: A Love Story, for which she earned another Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination.

The Grifters teamed her with John Cusack and she played a witch again in an adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches.

The two roles won her a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress.

Huston memorably moved into lighter territory as Morticia Addams in The Addams Family but was in the thick of it again in Sean Penn's The Crossing Guard.

She was paired her with ex-beau Nicholson as a divorced couple coping with the hit and run death of their daughter.

Following in the family tradition, she stepped behind the camera to direct the film adaptation of Bastard Out Of Carolina.

In 2001, she appeared as part of an ensemble cast in The Royal Tenenbaums and played Miss Harridan in the comedy Daddy Day Care.

Recent work includes the role of Bill Murray's wife in the off-kilter comedy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.