She was beautiful, and had a 5 year old daughter with her husband, the actor Danny Huston. She committed suicide this month before their divorce was even final, but the divorce did not “cause” her suicide. What caused it was bipolar disorder.
Katie Jane Evans, 35, was a born and bred English beauty, and her husband, 46, was the illegitimate son of the director John Huston and the English actress Zoe Sallis. They married in 2002, and moved to a house in the Hollywood Hills, in California, while Huston appeared in movies like How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. They visited Huston’s half sister, the actress Anjelica Huston. She was friends with the aristocratic Emma Parker Bowles, who also lived in LA.
Life seemed glamorous and exciting. Then things turned bitter.
The divorce proceedings, which she filed in California last year, were fraught with charges and countercharges. He used drugs. She tried to commit suicide with pain killers and alcohol, and had gone into rehab. He wasn’t capable of caring for their child. She wasn’t capable of caring for their child. She told Huston’s talent agent that she was bipolar, and had hidden that from her husband for their entire marriage.
Bipolar disorder is a serious mental illness also called manic depression; people with a severe form live chaotic lives on the edge, take risks, have periods of exhilaration and wild creativity, followed by deep depressions. Some 20 percent of the most seriously afflicted commit suicide.
Despite the acrimony, the terms of the divorce were settled amicably: Huston gave her their Hollywood Hills house and $17,500 a month, half his income, and they agreed on shared custody of their daughter, Stella.
But, her friends said, she went into a deep depression over the end of her marriage.
She moved from their house to an apartment in Manhattan Beach, south of LA. It was there that she took an overdose, called the police, and while Parker-Bowles was out of the apartment, jumped from the roof of her building at 5 pm to her death.
A source told The Daily Mail,“Katie couldn't get over the fact the marriage had failed … They married too soon, they barely knew each other, and Katie didn't take to life with an actor as well as she thought she would.”
But it wasn’t a failed marriage that killed her, it was a tragic disease, made worse by the fact that she had tried to hide it. Conditions like bipolar must be revealed, so that adequate and thoughtful care can be given, and the right medication.
Divorce is a failure, to be sure, a failure of two people to share lives, but sharing a life also means sharing deep secrets. Marriages can fail because of factors that are not disclosed until it is too late.
It is ironic, and sad, that John Huston was also thought to be bipolar, along the poet John Berryman, who committed suicide by jumping off a bridge, and Kurt Cobain, who overdosed on drugs. Contemporaries who have announced themselves to be bipolar include Carrie Fisher, Brian Wilson and Ted Turner.