Huxley on Huxley on AllMovie

Born in Turin, Italy, in 1911, Laura Archera led one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century. A virtuoso violinist as a teenager - on such an advanced level that she performed flawless concerts for Carnegie Hall and various European crowned heads - Archera later built a career for herself as a critically-praised author and a psychotherapist. In 1956, at the relatively advanced age of 45, Laura married Brave New World author Aldous Huxley (taking his surname as her own), and that marriage set the stage for one of the most remarkable of all intellectual subcultures: the Los Angeles avant-garde, which blossomed and flourished at the Huxley home in the Hollywood Hills, drawing such legends as Orson Welles, George Cukor, Christopher Isherwood and Igor Stravinsky to Saturday lunch. Later, inspired by the mescaline-consuming experiments that had inspired Aldous to author The Doors of Perception in 1954, The Huxleys began searching for higher levels of consciousness with extreme mind-altering psychedelic drugs. Peter Coyote narrates this look at Laura's strange and fascinating life, which features interviews with John Densmore (of The Doors), Nick Nolte, Michael Murphy and Ram Dass.