Charlton Heston; good Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Ten Commandments' and won an Oscar for 'Ben-Hur'
Charlton Heston was one of the iconic film stars of the 20th
century, a tall, rugged actor with patrician features who
became associated with epic spectacles in which he played
historical or biblical figures of influence and authority.
He was Moses in The Ten Commandments, won an Oscar for the
title role in Ben-Hur, and also played El Cid, John the
Baptist, Michelangelo, General Gordon and Mark Antony. He
did notable work too in such thrillers as the films noirs
Dark City and Touch of Evil, the western Will Penny and the
cult sci-fi movies Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man.
Though many people were alienated by his right-wing politics
and wholehearted embrace of the gun culture, his
professionalism and dedication to his craft were duly
acknowleged. In 1991 he was able to tell a journalist, "I
have never missed a day's shooting or a day's rehearsal, or
a performance on stage, a fact which I happen to be very
proud of". Ever one of his own toughest critics, he
commented, "You can spend a lifetime, and, if you're honest
with yourself, never once was your work perfect." One of his
last screen appearance, in Michael Moore's searing
documentary Bowling for Columbine (2002), showed an ailing
Heston, in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease,
defending his point of view regarding man's "God-given
right" to own guns.
He was born Charles Carter (Charlton was his mother's maiden
name, Heston his stepfather's surname) in Evanston,
Illinois, in 1923, but he was raised in the small town of St
Helen (population 120) in Michigan timber country: "I recall
a one-room school with 13 pupils in eight grades, three of
whom were my cousins." He appeared in a school play at the
age of five, and later said, 'I can't remember a time when I
did not want to be an actor.'
After graduating from New Trier High School, he enrolled at
Northwestern University on an acting scholarship, to study
speech and drama. He starred in a student production of Peer
Gynt in 1942 (filmed in 16mm), and acted on radio in Chicago
prior to serving three years with the air force as a radio
operator on B-52 bombers. After the Second World War he and
his wife Lydia Clark, whom he had met at university and
married in 1944, acted and directed at the Thomas Wolfe
Memorial Theater in Asheville, North Carolina.
He then moved to New York where he worked as a model while
making the rounds of casting agents. Hired by the actress
Katharine Cornell as part of her company, he made his
Broadway début in her production of Antony and Cleopatra
(1947). "I'm sure I got the job because I'm over six feet,"
he said. "Miss Cornell is a tall woman and likes tall actors
around." During the play's run, he appeared in several
"live" dramas on the prestigious television series Studio
One. The film producer Hal Wallis was impressed by his
performance in "Jane Eyre" for the series and signed him to
a contract. He made his professional film début starring in
Wallis' Dark City (1950), as a gambler who finds himself
stalked by the brother of a man who committed suicide after
losing at cards. In a role not entirely likeable, Heston
exhibited charisma and elicited sympathy.
With his muscular build, granite-like jaw and commanding
physical presence, he bore some resemblance to another
Wallis contractee, Burt Lancaster, and Heston's early roles
were those of tough, unpretentious heroes. His second film
was Cecil B. DeMille's Oscar-winning circus epic The
Greatest Show on Earth (1952). Heston played the circus
master, and later commented, "A lady wrote a letter to
DeMille which said, 'I thought the circus master fitted in
very well with the real actors'. I've always said that was
the best review I ever had."
He had his first biographical role when he played Andrew
Jackson in The President's Lady (1953), though the film
centred on Jackson's backwoods-born wife, played by Susan
Hayward. It was the first film in which Heston made a
conscious attempt to capture the regional dialect
appropriate for the role, something he would continue to do
for the rest of his career. "I've never understood why so
few American actors even try to learn the right accent for a
part,' he said.
There are at least twenty regional accents in this country,
sometimes varying in different centuries. Off the top of my
head, I believe only Marlon Brando and Meryl Streep, among
major actors, also undertake this preparation for a part.
Heston made 10 films in the three years after The Greatest
Show on Earth, including some routine westerns and soap
operas, but his noble bearing, strong-jawed bone structure
and his natural bent for conveying integrity and dignity
were soon noted, and after Andrew Jackson producers began
casting him as other stalwart, real-life heroes. He was
Buffalo Bill Cody in Pony Express (1953) and he portrayed
Bill Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition in The Far
Horizons (1955).
In 1956 he was cast by Cecil B. DeMille as Moses in The Ten
Commandments. Heston projected the required gravitas as the
Red Sea-parting hero, and his was also the voice of God in
the "Burning Bush" sequence. (His son Fraser, born during
the film's shooting, played Moses at the age of three
months.) The film was an enormous hit, one of the screen's
top moneymakers, and it gave Heston the first of several
roles with which he would always be identified.
Drawn back to the stage, he starred with his wife in a tour
of Detective Story in 1956, followed by a New York City
Center revival of Mr Roberts. "Theatre is the medium where I
started my career," he said. "It's the medium I was trained
for. Fortunately, when I came into movies, I came in with an
independent contract that let me do what I wanted. And I've
always done that." In January 1958 he starred with Claire
Bloom in his final live televison play, a highly regarded
version of Beauty and the Beast.
It was closely followed by the release of one of his finest
films, Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958), a box-office
failure at the time but since recognised as a classic. It
was Heston who persuaded the production company Universal to
let Welles direct the film.
When I first saw the script Welles wasn't attached to it and
it was an ineffectively written police story. So I said,
"Who do you have to direct?" and they said, "We haven't
decided on a director yet but we have Orson Welles to play
the heavy." "Why don't you let him direct? He's a pretty
good director." And you'd think that I had suggested my
mother to direct it. Fortunately, they finally gave it to
him . . . I was by that time in a position to exert certain
leverage. I was at a point where my views on who was going
to direct the picture had to be taken into account.
Moody and off-beat, the film perplexed audiences at the time
and even Heston later confessed that he was initially
disappointed. "Certainly it was a little experimental for
the Fifties."
Heston's role in William Wyler's epic western The Big
Country (1958) was secondary to the top-billed star, Gregory
Peck, and seemed not to befit his star status, but he was
pursuaded by his agent to accept it for the opportunity of
working with Wyler.
When Ben-Hur was in its planning stage, MGM offered Heston
the role of Messala, but his earlier work with Wyler paid
off when the director selected him to instead play the title
role. Wyler later told him that he had made up his mind on
the casting while they were still shooting The Big Country.
Heston cautiously wrote in his diary, "I hesitate to go on
record about another mammoth undertaking, after Ten
Commandments failed to throw me to the top, but this surely
won't hurt me."
An accurate prediction, for Ben-Hur swept the 1960 Oscars,
its 11 awards including Best Film and, for Heston, Best
Actor. Part of the actor's preparation for the film had been
six weeks' training in chariot-driving under the famed stunt
man Yakima Canutt (the film's second-unit director) so that
he could perform convincingly in the climactic race that was
the film's highlight. Said Heston,
Canutt shot all the driving stuff, but William Wyler cut the
sequence. He made it not just a spectacular race, but a
conflict between two men, Messala and Judah Ben-Hur. He
resisted the temptation to hold on the overwhelming long
shots of the packed circus.
Heston later described Wyler as "the best director of
performance, in film, that I have ever worked with".
At the Oscar ceremony, Heston controversially thanked
Christopher Fry, who had worked on the script throughout the
shooting, his speech infuriating the Writers Guild, who had
refused to allow MGM to give Fry a credit. (The dispute was
known to Academy voters, and the writing award was the only
one of 12 nominations that the film did not win.)
Heston turned down a co-starring role with Marilyn Monroe in
Let's Make Love, and instead he returned to Broadway when
given the chance to be directed by Laurence Olivier in The
Tumbler (1960), a play in free verse by Benn Levy. Its
Broadway run was brief, and it lost him the opportunity to
co-star with Cary Grant in The Grass is Greener.
Film-making in Hollywood was slow at the time due to a
Screen Actors Guild strike, and Heston gladly accepted an
offer to join the union's board. Led by the guild's
president Ronald Reagan, the strike successfully achieved
pension and medical plans funded by the studios plus fees to
be paid to actors when their work was re-run on television.
Heston was himself to serve six terms as guild president.
Heston was also one of a small group of actors (including
Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and James Garner) who took part
in Martin Luther King's march on Washington at the height of
the civil rights movement in 1964. "In a long life of
activism in support of some good causes, I'm proudest of
having stood in the sun behind that man, that morning."
Heston's politics attracted a lot of media attention over
the years, particularly his paradoxical switch to the right
that occurred in the 1964 elections, when he had "a true
revelation, almost an epiphany", and decided to support
Barry Goldwater instead of Lyndon Johnson. Later he ardently
supported President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and he
headed a conservative "watchdog" group called Actors Working
for an Actors Guild, constantly locking horns with erstwhile
president Ed Asner over Asner's public political statements.
"The board has no right to set our position on
save-the-whales or gun control or Israel," he declared.
His next epic film after Ben-Hur was Anthony Mann's El Cid
(1961), co-starring Sophia Loren and based on the life story
of the legendary Spanish hero who struggled to maintain his
honour when driving the Moors from Spain. On its completion,
Heston found time to demonstrate with others in front of
Oklahoma restaurants that were still refusing to serve black
people.
In another historical epic, 55 Days at Peking (1963), Heston
was the commander of American troops in Peking at the time
of the Boxer Revolution in 1900. Its director, Nicholas Ray,
collapsed during the shooting, so three other directors -
Guy Green, Noel Brown and Andrew Marton - worked on the
film. It proved a ponderous piece, though Heston gave a
forceful performance and was uncommonly touching in a
sequence in which he adopts an orphan.
Heston's awesome catalogue of heroes continued with his
portrayal of John the Baptist in George Stevens' The
Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). Heston's performance was
one of the few things critics liked in the turgid saga,
which was to be Hollywood's greatest financial disaster
until Heaven's Gate in 1980. Franklin Schaffner's The War
Lord (1965) found more favour with critics, particularly for
its meticulous reconstruction of life in 11th-century
England. Heston was a lord who exercises the law of droit de
seigneur, which allows him to take another man's bride on
her wedding night. Intelligently scripted and skilfully
performed, it failed to find the audience it deserved.
Heston later wrote,
The studio was convinced from the beginning that they had
the ingredients for a huge tits-and-armour piece. If we'd
been allowed to shoot in
the English marshes with an English cast, away from the
studio's enthusiastic urges that we spend more money on
flaming siege towers, I think we'd have the film we
envisioned.
As Michelangelo in Carol Reed's The Agony and the Ecstasy
(1965) he painted the Sistine Chapel and did verbal battle
with the Pope (Rex Harrison) in an overblown and inaccurate
piece that flopped at the box-office. In Basil Deardon's
epic Khartoum (1966) he portrayed the British hero General
Gordon in the last months of his life, climaxing with the
1883 battle in which his adversary was the militant Arab
leader the Mahdi, played by Sir Laurence Olivier.
Heston also appeared in a number of westerns including Sam
Peckinpah's Major Dundee (1965) and one of his personal
favourites ("one of the great parts of my life"), Tom Gries'
Will Penny (1968). A quiet and thoughtful piece, in which
the action arises out of character development, it featured
one of Heston's most affecting performances, as an
illiterate world-weary cowboy thwarted in his efforts to
lead a peaceful existence.
Heston worked with Tom Gries again on the football drama
Number One (1970), but the results were less pleasing. I met
Heston when he was in London for the film's preview at the
National Film Theatre and found him affable and modest -
when he discovered that I was a fellow tennis enthusiast he
insisted on introducing me to his companion for the evening,
the great Australian champion Rod Laver. Heston was himself
passionately keen on the game, and had a court built on his
grounds.
In 1968 Heston starred in one of his greatest hits, Planet
of the Apes, playing a time-travelling astronaut who, in one
of the most chilling climaxes in film history, discovers
that the simian-run planet on which he has landed is in fact
Earth. He briefly reprised his role in the first sequel,
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970).
I told Dick Zanuck, "I know you can't make this movie if I'm
not in it, but I really don't want to do it. We've already
told the story in the first one. The rest of them are just
going to be Adventures Among the Monkeys. I'll do it but in
this one kill me off. And give whatever money you want to
pay me to a charity." That's what happened.
He also starred in two other sci-fi movies. In The Omega Man
(1971), based on Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, he
was the only human to have emerged totally unscathed from an
atomic war, doing battle with covens of infected mutants who
only come out at night. Heston said that his leading lady,
Rosalind Cash, was the first to make him aware of his iconic
status when she told him, "It's a spooky feeling, to screw
Moses."
Soylent Green (1973) was set in a future in which the food
of mankind turns out to be people. "I think overpopulation
is the most serious problem facing the world today. That's
the main reason why I did the film. I guess it's my only
film with a strong social comment." Heston was also proud
that it was his idea to cast Edward G. Robinson, who was
outstanding in the last role of his life. "Casting him was
probably my most important contribution to the picture."
In 1972 he starred as a pilot in an early disaster movie
Skyjacked, and directed, adapted and starred in a laboured
film version of Antony and Cleopatra that was not a success.
Call of the Wild (1972) was described by the actor as "the
worst film I ever made". The disaster movie Earthquake
(1974), notable for being filmed in Sensurround, was a hit
with the public if not critics, but Heston's big-screen
career began to slip in the Seventies - he unwisely turned
down the role of Brody in Jaws (1975) and the ambassador in
The Omen (1976). In 1976 he was considered by the BBC for
the title role in I, Claudius (as was Ronnie Barker), but
the role went to Derek Jacobi.
Of his appearances in such undistinguished fare as
Earthquake, Airport 1975 (1974) and Midway (1976), he said,
"I've gotten to the point where I can, more or less, choose
to do what I want to do and who I want to do it with. I've
made a lot of little films like Touch of Evil and Will
Penny. But you have to balance that off with doing films now
and then that you are pretty certain are going to be
successful."
Offered the role of Athos in Richard Lester's The Three
Musketeers (1974) and its sequel The Four Musketeers (1975),
he opted for the cameo role of villainous Cardinal Richelieu
instead. His son Fraser wrote the script for Mountain Men
(1980), in which Heston and Robert Keith starred as ageing
trappers, after which Heston directed and starred in Mother
Lode (1982), which his son both wrote and produced. Neither
was successful, but the pair had more success with two films
for cable TV, Treasure Island (1990) with Heston as Long
John Silver, and Crucifer of Blood (1991), in which he
played Sherlock Holmes.
Devoting more time to the theatre, he appeared on the Los
Angeles stage in The Crucible (1974), Macbeth (1975) with
Vanessa Redgrave ("the finest actress alive though
politically she and I could not be farther apart"), and Long
Day's Journey into Night (1976) with Deborah Kerr. He had a
triumph in London in 1985 playing Captain Queeg in a revival
of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, and returned the
following year to play Sir Thomas More in A Man for All
Seasons prior to making a film version.
In the 1980s, he was frequently seen on television as a
spokesperson for conservative issues, and in 1985 he starred
in The Colbys, a spin-off from the hit series Dynasty, with
a similar emphasis on glamour and intrigue among the
super-rich. Heston played Jason Colby, head of a giant
multinational conglomerate, in the short-lived show best
remembered now for having one of the most bizarre
end-of-season cliffhangers ever devised for a TV soap-opera,
as Jason's daughter-in-law Fallon (Emma Samms), driving down
a remote country road, is abducted and carried away in an
alien spaceship. (That ended the series' second season, and
there was no third.)
Of the larger-then-life screen roles with which he became
most associated, Heston commented, "They've been a great
antidote for the corrosive effects of being a so-called
celebrity. When you're playing Moses, you go to your hotel
and try to part the water in the bathtub. When it doesn't
work you feel pretty humble."
When he served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, it
was pointed out that two of his predecessors, George Murphy
and Ronald Reagan, had then gone into politics. Heston,
though, stated that he had no political ambitions. "I've
played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses," he
said. "That should satisfy any man."
Tom Vallance
Charles Carter (Charlton Heston), actor: born Evanston,
Illinois 4 October 1924; married 1944 Lydia Clark (one son,
one adopted daughter); died Beverly Hills, California 5
April 2008.
Jim Beaver
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:iM-dnW0MSuLLZ2Da...@rcn.net...
> Charlton Heston: Iconic film actor who played Moses in 'The Ten
> Commandments' and won an Oscar for 'Ben-Hur'
>
>
>
> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/charlton-heston-iconic-film-actor-who-played-moses-in-the-ten-commandments-and-won-an-oscar-for-benhur-805418.html
Except for the parts about flying on B-52s in World War II and working with
"Robert" Keith in THE MOUNTAIN MEN, it's a good article.
Jim Beaver
J.D. Baldwin
In the previous article, Hyfler/Rosner <rel...@rcn.com> wrote:
> At the Oscar ceremony, Heston controversially thanked
> Christopher Fry, who had worked on the script throughout the
> shooting, his speech infuriating the Writers Guild, who had
> refused to allow MGM to give Fry a credit.
Heston said that he thanked Fry for the extensive help he'd provided
on the set. I think he also said (it's been a long time since I read
the story) that he didn't really *mean* to stir up controversy, but it
seems pretty self-evident that Heston wasn't the kind of guy to keep
his mouth shut just because speaking up was going to piss someone off.
> (The dispute was known to Academy voters, and the writing
> award was the only one of 12 nominations that the film did
> not win.)
Lost, deservedly, to "Room at the Top."
> Heston's awesome catalogue of heroes continued with his
> portrayal of John the Baptist in George Stevens' The
> Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). Heston's performance was
> one of the few things critics liked in the turgid saga,
> which was to be Hollywood's greatest financial disaster
> until Heaven's Gate in 1980. Franklin Schaffner's The War
> Lord (1965) found more favour with critics, particularly for
> its meticulous reconstruction of life in 11th-century
> England. Heston was a lord who exercises the law of droit de
> seigneur, which allows him to take another man's bride on
> her wedding night. Intelligently scripted and skilfully
> performed, it failed to find the audience it deserved.
> Heston later wrote,
Not very "meticulous" if it portrayed "droit de seigneur" as
historical fact.
> The studio was convinced from the beginning that they had
> the ingredients for a huge tits-and-armour piece.
<*splorf*>
> He also starred in two other sci-fi movies. In The Omega Man
> (1971), based on Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, he
> was the only human to have emerged totally unscathed from an
> atomic war, doing battle with covens of infected mutants who
> only come out at night. Heston said that his leading lady,
> Rosalind Cash, was the first to make him aware of his iconic
> status when she told him, "It's a spooky feeling, to screw
> Moses."
double-<*splorf*>
> In 1976 he was considered by the BBC for the title role
> in I, Claudius (as was Ronnie Barker), but the role went
> to Derek Jacobi.
And thank God for it. Heston was great, and all, but that would just
have been wrong, wrong, wrong.
Terrific obit. Very thorough, nice perspective, salted with some
great stories and quotes. (I love that "best review" one, though I've
heard it before.) Thanks for posting. Twenty thousand thanks, for
that matter.
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone disagrees with any statement I make, I
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / bal...@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it. -T. Lehrer
***~~~~-----------------------------------------------------------------------
mack
"Jim Beaver" <jumb...@prodigy.spam> wrote in message
news:blqLj.1928$%V7....@newssvr14.news.prodigy.net...
The one thing that has always rankled me about Heston (I rather liked the
man otherwise) was his assertion that his first gun was a .45 automatic that
he brought home from the Aleutians at the end of WWII. If it were HIS gun,
it wouldn't have been marked "US Govt. Property".
J.D. Baldwin
In the previous article, mack <mack...@dslextreme.com> wrote:
> > Except for the parts about flying on B-52s in World War II and
> > working with "Robert" Keith in THE MOUNTAIN MEN, it's a good
> > article.
> >
> > Jim Beaver
> Suppose the writer meant B-25s ?
I caught that one (but not the Brian Keith error) and just dismissed
it as an obvious typo/mistranscription. I would be less forgiving of
an American paper that got those aircraft mixed up.
> The one thing that has always rankled me about Heston (I rather liked
> the man otherwise) was his assertion that his first gun was a .45
> automatic that he brought home from the Aleutians at the end of WWII.
> If it were HIS gun, it wouldn't have been marked "US Govt. Property".
I own a gun with that stamp. The government can try to get it back,
but they'll take it from-- well, you know.
The government doesn't rub those stamps out when they sell or give
away the firearms, which they do quite a bit.
(I don't know whether Heston came into legitimate ownership of his,
but it's not at all impossible or even unlikely.)
Jim Beaver
"J.D. Baldwin" <INVALID...@example.com.invalid> wrote in message
news:ftlsjl$nhk$1...@reader2.panix.com...
>
> In the previous article, mack <mack...@dslextreme.com> wrote:
>> > Except for the parts about flying on B-52s in World War II and
>> > working with "Robert" Keith in THE MOUNTAIN MEN, it's a good
>> > article.
>> >
>> > Jim Beaver
>> Suppose the writer meant B-25s ?
>
> I caught that one (but not the Brian Keith error) and just dismissed
> it as an obvious typo/mistranscription.
The Keith thing isn't technically an error, since his name is Robert Keith
Jr. But this made it sound like Heston co-starred with Keith's father (also
a well-known actor).
Jim Beaver
mack
"J.D. Baldwin" <INVALID...@example.com.invalid> wrote in message
news:ftlsjl$nhk$1...@reader2.panix.com...
>
>> > Except for the parts about flying on B-52s in World War II and
>> > working with "Robert" Keith in THE MOUNTAIN MEN, it's a good
>> > article.
>> >
>> > Jim Beaver
>> Suppose the writer meant B-25s ?
>
> I caught that one (but not the Brian Keith error) and just dismissed
> it as an obvious typo/mistranscription. I would be less forgiving of
> an American paper that got those aircraft mixed up.
>
>> The one thing that has always rankled me about Heston (I rather liked
>> the man otherwise) was his assertion that his first gun was a .45
>> automatic that he brought home from the Aleutians at the end of WWII.
>> If it were HIS gun, it wouldn't have been marked "US Govt. Property".
>
> I own a gun with that stamp. The government can try to get it back,
> but they'll take it from-- well, you know.
>
> The government doesn't rub those stamps out when they sell or give
> away the firearms, which they do quite a bit.
>
> (I don't know whether Heston came into legitimate ownership of his,
> but it's not at all impossible or even unlikely.)
On the contrary, if he brought it home from the Aleutians, there was no way
he'd have bought it.
Much later when the DCM (Dept of Civilian Marksmanship) came into being, he
might have bought one, but otherwise, it was US Govt Property all the time
he had it.
Mark
many people were alienated by his right-wing politics."
I wonder who these "many people" are that they refer to ... and I
wonder if they used the same phrase, but substituting "left wing
politics" in obits of say Gregory Peck or Ossie Davis?
One wonders why that sentence was necessary (especially without any
examples to back up the statement).