How Exes Anjelica Huston and Jack Nicholson Reconnected After Cheating Scandal: ‘Water Under the Bridge’

As she fled her home during February’s California wildfires, Anjelica Huston’s phone rang.

“[Jack Nicholson] called and asked if I was all right, and if I had someplace I was staying,” she told The Guardian. “That’s the bottom line with he and I — when the chips are down, he’s there.”

From 1973 until 1990, Anjelica, 73, and Jack, 87, carried on one of Hollywood’s most legendary on-off love affairs despite his inability to remain true.

“It was how he was, and it wasn’t so personal,” says the Oscar-winning actress, who met Jack at a party at his home when she was 22. The daughter of famed director John Huston grew up in Ireland and knew she wanted to act since age 6. “I always had a weakness for character acting,” says the unconventional beauty.

She began modeling abroad when London was in full swing and moved to California at the dawn of the 1970s. As a boyfriend, Jack generously bought Anjelica a Mercedes, but she also had to endure his constant flirtations and infidelities.

“Pretty French girls would come up on motorbikes and say, ‘Oh, Jack, you want to ride on my bike with me?’” she recalled in her memoir Watch Me about attending the 1974 Cannes Film Festival with her lover, adding that Jack would go off and leave her standing on the sidewalk. “I would just retire to our hotel room in tears.”

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She calls her younger self “tragically gullible” when it came to Jack’s wandering eye. “He was actually quite discreet,” she says.

Anjelica remembers finding stray items of clothing and jewelry left behind by Jack’s other women. She even sometimes wore these remnants as if daring the interlopers to come and claim them. Eventually, Anjelica had her own romances on the side, including one with Ryan O’Neal, and built a fine acting career.

“I did what I wanted to do, and I did it with sureness,” she said. “If I wanted something, I knew how to go after it, so it wasn’t as though anything was being done to me. I wasn’t a wilting flower.”

But in 1990, Jack told her model Rebecca Broussard was having his baby. Anjelica, who’d long hoped that he’d marry her, responded a few days later by violently attacking the actor on the Paramount lot.

“I beat him savagely about the head and shoulders,” she recalled. “He was ducking and bending, and I was going at him like a prizefighter.”

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They didn’t reconnect until Sean Penn asked Anjelica to play Jack’s ex-wife in 1995’s The Crossing Guard.

“Anjelica was a big part of Jack’s life,” a friend of the actor, who says that the pair maintain a warm friendship today, exclusively confides to Closer. “He’s not proud of his indiscretions while he was with Anjelica, and she knows that. They’ve talked about it, and it’s been water under the bridge for many years.”

Jack has compared their relationship to Love in the Time of Cholera, the novel by Gabriel García Márquez about young lovers torn apart who find each other again in their later years.

“That is one of my favorite books, by one of my favorite authors,” Anjelica said. “[It’s] about one of my favorite subjects — hopeless, enduring love.”