His father's son

Most sons of Hollywood legends daft enough to pursue showbiz careers want nothing more than to emerge from the long shadow of their fathers into the glare of their own klieg lights. In the process, a good many of them end up on a shrink’s couch talking to the ceiling.

And then there is Danny Huston, who openly idolizes his father, the director John Huston, whose outsized film talents matched his appetites for women and booze as well as an acute appreciation of life’s absurdities.

Far from expunging the memory of the man who gave us ‘‘The Maltese Falcon,’’ ‘‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,’’ and ‘‘The African Queen,’’ the younger Huston is the keeper of his flame. He stamps his thoughts about his own movie career with the imprint of his father. He punctuates his monologues, which are practiced and seamless, with stories of the man and, with some frequency, eerie imitations of his leering drawl.

Huston, 44, grew up amid Hollywood royalty like Orson Welles, who frequented his father’s table. So who among them all shone the brightest? ‘‘He dwarfed them all,’’ he says of Huston pere. Indeed, he notes, in an early rough cut of ‘‘The Bible,’’ the elder Huston scored a hat trick as the voice of God, Noah, and the director.

Huston fils, whose latest movie, ‘‘The Proposition,’’ opens here Friday, was born in Rome, the product of an affair between his father and an actress named Zoe Sallis. ‘‘My standard answer,’’ he says when asked about his early days, ‘‘is I was conceived in ‘Freud,’ born during the preproduction of ‘The Bible,’ and teethed on ‘The Night of the Iguana.’’’

Huston grew up watching his father make movies, and it was from the set that he fell into directing, and then acting, himself. ‘‘I have memories like ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ as a young boy, with Kipling and the locations in the Atlas mountains — the whole thing was just fabulous,’’ he says wistfully.

He believes his relationship with his father succeeded because the man was over 50 when he was born and in his mid-70s when he acted in the 1988 film ‘‘Mr. North,’’ which his son directed. Had John Huston been a younger man when Danny was born, brimming with testosterone, chances are the story would have been an uglier one.

‘‘Maybe it’s because he was much older,’’ he muses. ‘‘He’d mellowed out.’’

Huston has a bit of the flaneur to him, which is why he excels playing a cad like Sandy, the duplicitous British diplomat in ‘‘The Constant Gardener.’’ He’s tall and graceful and rather soft. His grin is huge, his laugh too. They both come easily and often and hint at a formidable party animal with a louche past. Dressed in a well-cut black suit, his dark hair brushed back, he’s a natural on the Via Veneto, in Santa Monica or Notting Hill.

He has lived on the Via Giulia, perhaps the most elegant street in Rome, and sprouted roots in London, Ireland, and LA, where he now encamps with wife and child. (He was formerly married to the actress Virginia Madsen and remains close to his half-sister, Anjelica.)

He is also a polyglot with a transatlantic gumbo of an accent. While he considers London his home — ‘‘I feel a bit more sane there’’ — he sports his Irish r’s with pride, which helps him with American-speak, and rolls them fluidly in Italian. He delights in ‘‘Ferrrrrarrrrri.’’

Huston is an interesting creature in Hollywood — a late bloomer. He first tried art school in London — he loves to paint — and started hitting the gallery scene there. ‘‘I was drinking warm white wine, schmoozing,’’ he recalls. ‘‘I realized this is just as bad as the movie scene. It wasn’t my father that I wanted to escape. It was that world.’’

He has a few forgotten directing credits under his belt but found purchase as an actor in a growing list of small roles. He copped parts in ‘‘Leaving Las Vegas,’’ ‘‘The Aviator,’’ ‘‘21 Grams,’’ ‘‘Silver City,’’ and ‘‘Birth’’ before playing against Ralph Fiennes in ‘‘The Constant Gardener.’’

What put him on the map, though, was his astonishing lead performance in ‘‘Ivansxtc,’’ a shoestring indie cowritten and directed by Bernard Rose on an early Sony digital camera. Released in 2000, it is chronicles the last days of a manic Hollywood agent who is dying of cancer. Huston found a sweetness in the character of Ivan Beckman, along with the integrity of a moray eel and, most memorably, a shattering loneliness.

It is this role, he says, that marked the start of a rising trajectory in his acting career, and it was this sense of impending doom that caught ‘‘Proposition’’ director John Hillcoat’s attention. ‘‘I’d seen ‘Ivansxtc’ and had no idea who Danny was,’’ says Hillcoat by phone from New York. ‘‘I made no connection with his family. I thought, ‘Who is this guy? He’s incredible.’ In moments by himself in the film, I saw a real darkness there.’’

Huston has plenty of darkness to work with in ‘‘The Proposition’’ as Arthur Burns, a psychotic killer who leads a gang in a spree of rape and murder in the Australian Outback of the 1880s. Huston sees a lot of Kurtz in the character — ‘‘Heart of Darkness’’ or ‘‘Apocalypse Now’’ — take your pick.

‘‘First, there’s the structure of the story. You don’t meet him until near the end. He’s a character who’s gone over to the other side,’’ he says of Burns. ‘‘His lover has become violence and death. And, in a way, he welcomes his own death.’’

He claims to be happy with small parts. What he craves is access into filmmaking, in any form. ‘‘I think of myself as a storyteller, really,’’ he explains. ‘‘I love to write and direct. And acting is a way to be close to the storytelling and also to observe the director at work. I remember my father when directing would make the same gesture the actor was making.’’

He has a tiny role as Emperor Joseph II in Sofia Coppola’s new film, ‘‘Marie-Antoinette,’’ and a whale of a thing as Orson Welles in the upcoming ‘‘Fade to Black,’’ where he plays the aging enfant terrible as he tries to resuscitate his career in Rome in 1948. ‘‘He’s a bit of a broken man by then. There’s the alone Welles, the afraid Welles.’’

And, tantalizingly, there is the script written by his father called ‘‘Emparo’’ about a Mexican prostitute that was discovered in a dusty trunk some years ago. Will Huston ever direct it? ‘‘I don’t see why not,’’ he says. So what’s stopping him? ‘‘Time. I’m looking for a lull in the acting.’’

The father looms large, never far from the son. He too grew up in the thrall of a famous father, the actor Walter Huston. This message was driven home to Danny when he found some newspaper clippings in a scrapbook of his paternal grandmother about an auto accident in LA involving the young John Huston.

‘‘Every headline said, ‘Walter Huston’s son caught in car accident.’ Not one of the articles mentions him by name,’’ he says. ‘‘This was before ‘Maltese Falcon.’ So nepotism and working together as a family has been going on for longer than I realized.’’

If Danny is proud of the tradition, he’s also tempered by its rigors. ‘‘There’s the shame that comes from screwing up,’’ he says.

‘‘I remember when I made ‘Mr. North’ — I’m still proud of it — there was a review in the LA Times that said ‘John Huston passed over the baton to his son, Danny, who then tripped and dropped it.’ That kind of stuff hurts. But somehow you have to dust yourself off and move on.’’

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.