Therapist and author Laura Archera Huxley died 13 December 2007 of cancer. Born in Turin, Italy, in 1911, she was first a concert violinist, but may be best remembered for being Aldous Huxley’s widow. She came to the US in the 1940s to debut at Carnegie Hall, and then played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for several years.
She met Huxley in 1948, 16 years after his Brave New World made him famous. They married in 1956, a year after the death of his first wife, and for the next seven years (until his death in 1963), she was his muse and they were partners in “the explorations of consciousness that helped to spark the psychedelic movement of the 1960s,” according to her Los Angeles Times obituary.
Following Aldous’s death, Laura devoted most of her time to preserving his legacy and helping others achieve happiness. She wrote several inspirational or self-help books, as well as This Timeless Moment, which was a memoir of their life together.
“What Laura Huxley did was devote her life and energy and vision to making sure this very important writer in the Western canon was still in print and widely published,” said Jonathan Kirsch, the attorney for the Huxley literary estate. One of her last projects was to bring Brave New World to the movie screen. It is now in development with a major motion picture studio, Kirsch said.
Laura founded Children: Out Ultimate Investment, a nonprofit group dedicated to fostering optimal development of “the possible human” in 1978. She never had children of her own, but once described the organization’s goal as “bringing children up loving the world, rather than fearing it as many children do.”
She ended her career as a violinist in 1948, when the death of a close friend spurred her to make major changes in her life. She went to work as a film editor at RKO Studios, and met Aldous while she was trying to promote a film she wanted to make about the Palio di Siena, an annual horse race through the streets of Siena, Italy. As the Times says, “Director John Huston told her that if she could get Aldous Huxley to write the screenplay, he could help her obtain financing. She wrote to the author, who had spent time in Italy and was then living in the desert outside Los Angeles. When she got no reply, she was a bit miffed. She found his phone number and called him, unaware that the number belonged to a post office near where he lived. ‘They asked me if it was an emergency,’ she recounted to the London Guardian in 2002, ‘and I said, “Of course it’s an emergency.”‘ The message got through, and she became a close friend to both Aldous and his wife, Maria.”
After Maria’s death from cancer in 1955, Aldous proposed to Laura, and she said yes.