Huston’s comfortable in the family business

LOS ANGELES - In his prime, Danny Huston has found his calling as an actor.

It all started as a way to make a few bucks while waiting for his directing gigs to come together. But in the Huston family tradition of his Oscar-winning grandfather Walter (“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”) and half-sister Anjelica (“Prizzi’s Honor”), Danny Huston has become a fiercely compelling actor.

“I’m happy to be coming to acting at this point in my life rather than starting too young,” the 43-year-old says over a cup of afternoon English tea at Victor’s, just below his home in Los Angeles’ Bronson Canyon. “It’s hard to have the pathos if you haven’t lived somewhat.”

The self-described bon vivant has lived a colorful life. He started out following in his Oscar-winning father John’s footsteps as a director. John Huston was in his early 50s and Danny Huston’s actress mother, Zoe Sallis, was in her early 20s “when I came about,” he says. Huston grew up in Ireland, Rome and London, where he studied art and film; he has inherited his father’s rakish charm as a raconteur.

After jumping onto casting directors’ radar with his painfully exposed 2000 performance in “Ivansxtc” as a glad-handing Hollywood talent agent dying a lonely death in the Hollywood Hills, Huston has delivered a string of juicy roles for such directors as Martin Scorsese (“The Aviator”), John Sayles (“Silver City”), Jonathan Glazer (“Birth”), Mike Figgis (“Time Code”), Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu (“21 Grams”) and, most recently, Fernando Meirelles (“The Constant Gardener”). Next month, John Hillcoat’s “The Proposition,” a bloody Australian Western co-starring Huston as a larger-than-life sociopathic killer, opens stateside. The actor also has four completed films coming up beyond that, including Sofia Coppola’s Cannes competition entry “Marie-Antoinette.”

“It felt natural,” says Huston, who plays Emperor Joseph II. “She’s family in a Mafia Hollywood dynasty way. I feel like I’m her cousin.”

Huston’s directing career never quite took off. At age 24, he directed his father in British TV’s “Mr. Corbett’s Ghost,” followed by the 1988 indie drama “Mr. North,” starring Anthony Edwards, Robert Mitchum and sister Anjelica. But while filming the 1991 Euro-pudding production “Becoming Collette” and the horror flick “The Maddening,” Huston “made a few compromises,” he admits.

Next, he had lined up a great cast for his adaptation of Graham Greene’s “A Burnt-Out Case,” including Ben Kingsley, Richard Harris, Denholm Elliott and the young Catherine Zeta-Jones, but, he recounts, the financing collapsed. Instead, Huston took on an ice-skating movie for German TV, “Die Eisprinzessin,” starring Katerina Witt as Cinderella.

After that “I locked my heels,” Huston says. “I wanted to make the next thing my way. I wouldn’t compromise or bend.” So began a long sojourn in limbo. “L.A. has a seasonless quality,” he recalls. “Years go by, and you don’t notice it. You have meetings here and there. I was writing but not doing much. My fellow directors started giving me parts out of the kindness of their hearts.”

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