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The last time I met Anjelica Huston was six or seven years ago in a luxury oceanfront hotel in Venice, California. It was windy and cold, Huston was still a smoker – we talked outside in the wind while she lit up like a naughty schoolgirl. Today, it's a blisteringly hot day, she's an enviably youthful 60, an ex-smoker now, sitting in the lounge of the luxury hotel next door, before a gigantic cinemascope window affording guests a million-dollar view of the Pacific, which looks seriously tempting in today's heat.

"I went in the ocean this year, the day after my birthday," she tells me as we watch the breakers gently roll in, "and it was actually really nice. It's like the Eiffel Tower is for Parisians, though, the beach in LA. It's right there, but you barely even look at it most of the time."

Spoken like a true Angeleno.

We're here to talk about Horrid Henry: The Movie, a swivel-eyed comedy based on the children's books by Francesca Simon and Tony Ross, in which she plays the screechy teacher, Miss Battle-Axe (we're on the uglied-up Morticia Addams end of the Huston spectrum again).

"It's very British material to me, and I've always been strangely attracted to these extreme characters, like Miss Battle-Axe. I found her irresistible! I hadn't seen the cartoon or the book, which I hear is second in popularity in Britain to Harry Potter. I guess you have to have a few seven-year-old children to really appreciate that."

How was it working with all those kids?

"Most of my scenes were with Theo Stevenson [the titular bad boy], but English kids are so polite and enthusiastic, and not blase. I did that movie Daddy Day Care, with a bunch of five- and six-year-old American kids, and they were so sophisticated and scarily together compared with this group, who were sweet and happy and enthusiastic. The script was very charming, I liked the director, and it felt like a good idea to go and play in London for a while."

Huston arrives alone, no PR flak, no retinue, no muscle, just a slender, well-dressed and coiffed California woman of a certain age and, if you look closely enough, a striking, instantly familiar cast of feature. But today, in white pants, a simple blouse and open-toed sandals, she might as well be in disguise. She probably walked here today from her home nearby, unrecognised and unmolested.

To be as unassuming and well-adjusted and as smart and, well, as normal as Anjelica Huston has turned out to be is, to say the least, unusual among the children of fathers as legendary – and notorious – as hers, the buccaneering, larger-than-life, genius-hero-monster John Huston, a maverick back when that word still meant something.

Put it down to a childhood spent far away from Hollywood, across the Atlantic in Galway, where her father bought a manor house in 1952, and where Huston grew up in rural isolation among dogs, horses, and the Hollywood legends who often passed through, en route to or from some European location shoot.

Her childhood in the rural manor house, I tell her, reminds me of some idyllic children's book by Dodie Smith, or E Nesbit.

"My father moved there when I was about two years old – he had just finished working on Moulin Rouge in France and was looking for a place to put his family. Even though he and my mother [the late prima ballerina Enrica Soma] were separating at the time – a situation that I've been finding out in the course of working on a memoir I've been writing – but they were already, shall we say, a little, not estranged, but moving apart, even as they bought the place in Ireland. He was introduced to Irish fox hunting on a visit to Ireland the year before."

This seems like a quintessential John Huston activity, like shooting elephants and marlin fishing.

"It was, it was very JH. I think in a way because Ireland was a remote place, and my brother and I were brought up in the big manor house, we found our own relationships with place and nature, and with a sense of isolation, and the need to entertain yourself. I've found myself making attempts to recreate that feeling in different places during my life, but it's harder, nothing's out of reach or remote any more, everything's filled in."

Meanwhile, her father was an intermittent presence, returning home after three- or four-month absences after wrapping his various movies of that period – Moby Dick, Freud: The Secret Passion, The Misfits.

"Oh, it was wonderful, he'd be loaded down with strange things from foreign lands. There'd be hampers full of kimonos and Mexican tea sets, we'd put on plays. My brother and I would look forward to it for weeks beforehand. But it was hard having a parent that one generally wrote letters to. So the excitement of seeing him in the flesh was so great that when he left again we'd be clinging on to his ankles and begging him not to go."

Was your father scary?

"Oh yes, he was big and tall – I only remember him having one friend who was taller and scarier than he was – and he had this deep voice and he was certainly commanding. He was always sweet with me when I was a little girl – I was definitely Daddy's little girl – but there was no question that he was in charge of all situations."

Including her first movie, an ill-remembered Francis-and-Sofia Coppolaesque debacle from 1969, when Huston was just 16, called A Walk With Love and Death. I saw that one recently, I tell her, with an apparently obvious neutrality in my voice.

"Oh, you did?" she guffaws, a magnificent, dirty laugh. "What an endurance test that must have been – good for you!"

Not that good, I fell asleep and erased it when I woke up. Life's too short.

"Exactly what it deserves! I was 16, and rebellious like any teenager. I also didn't really respond to the script, and that's a fundamental problem for me, then and now. But my father wasn't really interested in hearing my complaints. The idea that I might know what constituted good writing was anathema to him, and perhaps pretty arrogant on my part."

So the acting bug did not bite?

"Well, I wanted to be an actor, but not like that. It was like being under lock and key with your father making you learn your lines. Exactly the opposite experience than the one I was hoping for. Exactly the opposite."

Having grown up mainly in Ireland, was returning to America in the early 1970s like moving to a foreign country? "Well, my parents were both American so there was always that sense of home and belonging, and I had been here a few times. So I had … an impression of America. It was really because I was understudying Ophelia in Tony Richardson's touring Hamlet [Marianne Faithfull was Ophelia] and we were on tour when my mother was killed very suddenly and violently in a car crash. I didn't want to go on being in London then. It was too difficult and  sad."

Instead, she moved to New York for the first of two golden-age experiences she would participate in during the 1970s: the pinnacle years of post-1960s American fashion. A friend from Mademoiselle magazine hooked her up with modelling work and she had the advantage of having Richard Avedon as a family friend. She also entered a relationship with photographer Bob Richardson, some 25 years her senior. He was pioneering a new rough-and-ready, rock'n'roll look to his work, and Huston featured prominently; her dark, angular looks in stark contrast to the bosomy, corn-fed Cybill Shepherd specimens then in favour.

Huston and Richardson were prominent in the Warhol circle in nightly conclaves at the New York nightspot Max's Kansas City, or out on the town with Marisa and Berry Berenson, Diana Vreeland, Helmut Newton and countless other luminaries of glam-era Manhattan, all at the age of 21.

"It was a very specific time, not really comparable to anything now. There were poets and singers and transvestites and models. I never knew Edie Sedgwick, but that element was in the mix, wayward American aristocracy inserting itself into the Warhol milieu, and into others."

Suddenly she sings out: "Hey d'you think we could find a waiter around here? I need coffee!"

I know, it's outrageous. Can't they see there are famous people out here?

"Oh, they don't care about that at all, which is why I like this place so much! It's always a little subdued – perhaps too subdued today, though. Practically somnolent."

Coffee is finally summoned, and we talk about golden age No 2, her long on-and-off relationship with Jack Nicholson as he rose to become the signature movie star of the 70s, which started after he'd finished The Last Detail and before he made Chinatown alongside John Huston (here I have a momentary twinge of anxiety: I'm talking to Noah Cross's actual daughter).

"He was well on his way to becoming the actor we know, but to me, he was always fully who he was. So the fact that his oeuvre or his opus or whatever finally caught up with him proves to me that he was always the person he became."

And when she finally returned to acting, irony of ironies, it was in care of her father, in Prizzi's Honour, opposite Nicholson. "Well, by this time I was ready. I had studied acting seriously and I knew a lot more about what I was doing, I'd done quite a bit of theatre. This time around, it all happened much more under my own auspices than under his."

After Prizzi's Honour, she appeared, magnificently, in her father's swansong, The Dead, then as Martin Landau's tacky, inconvenient mistress in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanours. Her subsequent career, a potent mix of mainstream support roles, TV dramas, and indie leads for directors as varied as Wes Anderson and the turbulent Vincent Gallo, including her mesmerisingly daring performance as a murderous, incestuous mother Lilly Dillon in The Grifters, has been spiced with awards and nominations. She has also directed three movies, including the ferocious Bastard Out of Carolina and Agnes Browne, a poignant valentine to Ireland in the 1950s.

We wrap up talking about Gallo, for whom she appeared in Buffalo '66.

"When I showed up to work for him, he was in an odd state of resentment toward me, which isn't a great way to start a movie. We got past that, and I felt we had a good on-set rapport. Then he got kind of vicious about me in the Village Voice. I don't think he can help himself, I think he's got Tourette's or something. He does seem to burn his bridges, though, which is a pity because he's talented. I didn't see The Brown Bunny. There's something about brown," she murmers. "Jack always used to say 'Never give brown presents', and short of fine leather, I know exactly what he means."

Plus, it's the colour of excrement.

"And Jack made exactly that point!"

Again, that big, dirty laugh. Magnificent. I can't wait to read that memoir.

Horrid Henry: The Movie is released on 29 July.

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