Search Results for 'Ricki'

It was John Huston’s wife Ricki, who first saw St Clarens, a large Georgian house, and gardens near Craughwell, Co Galway. She had been staying with Derek and Pat Trench at Woodford House for the Galway Races. When she heard the house was coming up for sale by public auction she went to check it out. Once owned by the O’Hara Burkes,* it was then a virtual ruin, and in the hands of the Land Commission.

John Huston was an expert rider, and expected his children to be so too. From an early age both Anjelica and her brother Tony were given horses. St Clerans, a magnificent Georgian house on a large estate at Craughwell, County Galway, had a full stable, watched over and trained by Paddy Lynch, a former jockey. Huston brought his family to live there in the 1950s while he travelled the world making films. He would come home for energetic holidays usually with Hollywood friends, and at times with his latest mistress. Once home, however, the sometimes lonely childhood lives of his two children would burst into action. Huston impressed upon them that the most important things in life were courage, and not to be a ‘dilettante’. He explained, as he smoked his brown cigarillo, that a ‘dilettante’ was a ‘dabbler, an amateur, someone who simply skims the surface of life without commitment.’

The renowned film actor, and patron of the Galway Huston School of Film, Anjelica Huston, was born in Los Angeles on July 8 1951. The news of her arrival was promptly cabled to the post office of Butiaba, in western Uganda. Two days later a barefoot runner bearing a telegram finally arrived at Murchison Falls, on the Nile, deep in the heart of the Belgian Congo, where The African Queen was being filmed.