Charlton Heston

Published Tuesday 15 April 2008 at 10:25 by Patrick Newley

Charlton Heston’s steely-jawed and imposing screen presence made him one of the cinema’s most popular actors and the appropriate star for several biblical epics, most notably The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959). He was also a distinguished classical stage actor who appeared regularly on Broadway and on several occasions in London’s West End.

A leader off screen as well as on, he served six terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild and was chairman of the American Film Institute.

Born John Charles Carter on October 4, 1923, in Evanston, Illinois, he originally studied drama at Northwestern University and gained early experience playing the lead in a 1941 filmed school production of Peer Gynt.

He served with the Air Force for three years during the Second World War and afterwards made his professional stage debut in summer stock in North Carolina. He made his first Broadway appearance in Katharine Cornell’s 1947 production of Anthony and Cleopatra and was subsequently seen regularly on American TV playing roles such as Heathcliff, Julius Caesar and Petruchio.

His first major film role was in 1950, opposite Lizabeth Scott in the film noir Dark City, and with his dominant physical presence he quickly became one of Hollywood’s biggest names, playing unflinching heroes and larger than life characters.

His biggest break came when Cecil B DeMille cast him as the stern Moses in the lavish The Ten Commandments, and from then on he went on to headline numerous spectaculars, giving him the opportunity to play everyone from John the Baptist to Michelangelo to El Cid to General Gordon. He once commented: “I have played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses. If that doesn’t create an ego problem, nothing does.”

In 1959, he won an Academy Award for the title role in William Wyler’s Ben-Hur.

In his later career he appeared in a string of successful sci-fi and disaster movies, such as Planet of the Apes (1968) and its sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Skyjacked (1972), the cult thriller Soylent Green (1973) and Earthquake (1974). He also appeared in numerous made for tv films and mini-series. In 1982 he made his debut as a film director, with Mother Lode.

Heston was a great admirer of British theatre and was a regular visitor to London, often as a guest of the late Laurence Olivier, whom he regarded as a mentor. On the London stage he appeared in revivals of A Man for All Seasons and The Caine Mutiny and in 1997 he toured the UK in AR Gurney’s two-hander Love Letters, with his wife Lydia Clarke. The production came to London in 1999, but it was poorly received by the critics. In 1996 he appeared in Kenneth Branagh’s film Hamlet.

Off screen, though an early civil rights advocate and one-time Democrat supporter, Heston became a staunch conservative political activist and often engaged in vocal battles with liberal-leaning actor Ed Asner over Screen Actors Guild policies. He was a high-profile member of the National Rifle Association and for several years served as co-chairman of his friend Ronald Reagan’s Task Force on the Arts and Humanities. He wrote an autobiography, The Actor’s Life: Journals (1956-1976), in 1978.

In 2002 Heston publicly admitted that he was “suffering from symptoms consistent with Alzheimer’s disease”. “For an actor, there is no greater loss than the loss of his audience,” he said in a television broadcast. “I can part the Red Sea, but I can’t part with you, which is why I won’t exclude you from this stage in my life.”

He died on April 5, 2008.

He is survived by his wife Lydia, his son, the film director Fraser Heston and his daughter Holly Heston Rochell.