TORONTO – Academy Award-winning actress Anjelica Huston says she owes a debt of gratitude to … a pencil?

True, it’s not the type of shout-out usually found in the acknowledgments section of a book, but the “Prizzi’s Honor” star is unabashed in her praise for the writing instrument she used to create her new memoir, “A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York.”

“The Paper Mate Sharpwriter #2. A wonderful pencil,” Huston, 62, said recently over the line from New York City, where she was about to be feted at a book party.

“It’s just a beautifully created object. It works really, really well. I didn’t grow up typing, to tell you the truth. … I like the flow of brain to hand. I think you have to do what comes naturally and what feels best.”

Indeed, the actress says the memoir itself evolved organically after a period of self-reflection following the 2008 death of her husband, sculptor Robert Graham.

“I was writing for myself anyway and I thought, well, maybe this is a good time. So that’s sort of how it initially came about.”

The actress — the daughter of legendary film director John Huston and his fourth wife, ballerina Enrica (Ricki) Soma — soon found she had a lot to say. So much, in fact, that her editor at Scribner (Simon & Schuster) decided that she’d need two volumes to tell her story.

That said, don’t expect anecdotes about Huston’s longtime relationship with Jack Nicholson, or insights about working with Woody Allen in this instalment. “A Story Lately Told” chronicles Huston’s early life in Ireland, her teen years modelling in swinging London and — after her mother died in a car accident in 1969 — a stint in New York City living at the Chelsea Hotel with her much-older photographer boyfriend Bob Richardson.

John Huston looms large in the book, which opens with a remarkable anecdote about news of his daughter’s birth reaching him in the Belgian Congo on the set of “The African Queen,” where Katharine Hepburn urged him to share the contents of a telegram heralding the news.

The director had a colourful life — he was called the “eccentric’s eccentric” by actor Paul Newman — and was a boxer, a lothario and a gambler. He was also away working on film sets for long stints of Huston’s childhood, but the actress says she and her brother understood the demands of their father’s art from a young age.

“It wasn’t a question of resenting him ever, it was merely a question of wishing there were more of him to go around — to be at work and also at home,” she said.

“There’s a line that comes up a lot around my father. People refer to him as Hemingway-esque. I think he really merits a description of his own. He was, yes, larger than life, an adventurer, a hunter, a Renaissance man. I think it’s very easy to come up with comparisons to other people but he was very much himself. He was an original.”

So too were the dizzying cast of characters who populated the Huston world and are chronicled in “A Story Lately Told.”

The actress — whose film credits also include “The Addams Family” and “The Royal Tenenbaums” — is quick to reel off her impressions when asked about just a few of them.

Of the writer John Steinbeck, Huston recalls he was: “a visitor to our house in Ireland when I was, oh I guess 10 or 11 and we formed a very nice friendship. He played Santa Claus one year. He was a beautiful man … very direct and he didn’t speak to you like a child.”

On actor Montgomery Clift: “I first met him when my father was making ‘Freud’ (in Munich) and he seemed to me a very troubled person. When I met him he was weeping and that worried me. I was a little girl, probably about eight or nine, and I walked in on my father sort of lecturing him in a hotel room and I felt very sorry for him.”

On actor Marlon Brando: “I met (him) at the house. I remember he was wearing a kind of maroon, velour sweatshirt. I’d been told he was the most famous actor in the world and I expected a sort of conventionally beautiful-looking man so I was quite taken a aback when I saw him. He had a rather hawk-like face.”

And of the poet W.H. Auden: “It felt as though he were sort of working class. He always wore these carpet slippers … and he’d be drinking tea. … He had a very lined face, he was fantastic looking, in a very — it was more than rugged — craggy way. But he was sort of monosyllabic.”

Despite a four-decade film career that has earned her a host of honours, Huston — who was seen recently in TV’s “Smash” — says she was nervous about how her memoir would be received, calling the positive reviews “thrilling.”

“You never know, and it’s one thing to act in a movie and be up for criticism, and obviously that’s going to happen, but it’s another thing to have your life up for critics. It’s a slightly different thing,” she said.

“You know you hope people will approve but basically if they don’t, it’s not about a movie, it’s about you.”

“A Story Lately Told” hit stores Tuesday. Huston says volume two will likely be released next year.