Laura Archera Huxley (1911–2007)

Laura Archera Huxley was born in Turin, Italy. At the suggestion of her father, she began playing the violin at age 10. Proving to be a prodigy, she studied in Berlin, Paris and Rome. While still a teenager. she gave recitals in Europe and at Carnegie Hall in New York City. She also studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. In 1940, as she was about to board an ocean liner to return home, she received a telegram from her father, whose wife was Jewish and being harassed by the Italian authorities, urging her to stay in the USA. Laura joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but by 1945 had grown tired of an orchestra musician's life. She became a film editor at RKO Studios in Hollywood and then a freelance documentary filmmaker. One day in 1948, she called Aldous Huxley, 20 years her senior, at home in Los Angeles to ask for his help with a screenplay. They became friends, and a year after the death of his first wife Maria in 1955, they were married. Over the next seven years, she was his muse and partner in the explorations of consciousness that helped to spark the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. After Huxley's death in 1963, Laura wrote This Timeless Moment, a memoir published in 1968, and devoted nearly 50 years to preserving his legacy and helping children and others. She also wrote several pioneering self-help books, including You Are Not the Target (1963), Between Heaven and Earth (1974), One-a-Day Reason to Be Happy (1986), and The Child of Your Dreams (1987).

She appeared in Hofmann's Potion: The Early Years of LSD, a documentary from the National Film Board of Canada, and Huxley on Huxley in 2010.