Allegra Huston

Don't waste time on what's not important. Don't get sucked into the drama. Get on with it: don't dwell on the past. Be a big person; be generous of spirit; be the person you'd admire.

I was a supporting character in other people's lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.

I was not a Southern California girl. I hated having my photograph taken. I felt shy and embarrassed around famous people.

Because Dad was famous, I was so used to being identified as 'John Huston's daughter' that I couldn't think of myself as anyone else.

I see myself as part English and part American, with a dash of Irish thrown in, and a pinch of Italian from my mother's ancestry.

I, personally, have had to rise above my feelings of inferiority to my sister Anjelica, not to mention feeling sorry for myself because I lost my mother so young.

What I am most grateful for is that neither of my fathers pushed the relationship; they just let things develop and didn't impose anything on me. They were both just there, emanating stability in a very unstable situation.

I look at 'Love Child' and it's as if it was written by someone else - someone who knew what they were doing.

I loved Dad more for treating the biological reality as trivial, irrelevant. He loved me no less than his other three children.

With my stepson, it is very important to me that there is no drama around the fact that he has two families.

Losing one's mother to a car crash at age four isn't a readily accessible idea of good luck, but I've come to accept it as the condition that was required for my luck to fall into place.

The most important thing in convoluted families, I learnt as I wrote, is that the child feels loved. I knew from a young age that I was a problem which required constant solving; but I never felt unloved. I was lucky.