An actor whose name is synonymous with movie spectaculars, his having played a range of epic characters from Ben-Hur to Moses and from Michelangelo to El Cid. With his large, muscular body and strong facial features, he has an imposing presence that lends authority to his acting, matched by an inner dignity that shines through in his best work. In a career that includes more than 50 films, Charlton Heston has also found time to star in TV and theater projects throughout the roughly five decades of his professional acting life. In addition, he has been active in Hollywood politics as a six-term past president of SAG (Screen Actors Guild).
Born Charlton Carter in Michigan’s backwoods, he studied acting at Northwestern University and made his way to New York to break into theater. To make ends meet, he posed in the nude for art students at $1.50 per hour. After gaining experience in regional theater, he got his first big break in a supporting role in Antony and Cleopatra on Broadway in 1947. Charlton Heston then became one of the first major movie stars to come to national prominence through his work in television. He starred in highbrow live TV specials in the late 1940s such as Julius Caesar (as Antony, 1948), Of Human Bondage (1948), Wuthering Heights (1949), and Macbeth (1949).
Although he acted in two 16mm amateur films, Charlton Heston made his professional film debut in Paramount’s Dark City (1950), a low-budget movie that did not set Hollywood afire. Not until his second film, the star-studded The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), for which he was chosen by CECIL B. DEMILLE for an important role, was Charlton Heston’s movie career given a jolt. He acted steadily throughout the early 1950s in films such as Ruby Gentry (1952), Pony Express (1952), and The Private War of Major Benson (1955). Though he was playing leading roles, he was hardly a major star. That changed overnight when Cecil B. DeMille cast him as Moses in the stellar remake of the director’s silent classic The Ten Commandments (1956).
The film was a colossal hit, putting Charlton Heston in a position to pick and choose his projects. Much to his credit, he chose Touch of Evil (1958) and insisted that ORSON WELLES direct it. The movie has since been recognized as one of Welles’s great films. That same year, Charlton Heston agreed to accept the modest role of a heavy in The Big Country (1958) for the chance to work with famed veteran director WILLIAM WYLER. Wyler appreciated both Charlton Heston’s gesture and his talent and offered him the role of the villain in the director’s next movie, Ben-Hur (1959). Later, after BURT LANCASTER chose not to play the title character, Wyler eventually handed it to Charlton Heston, who ultimately won an Oscar as Best Actor for his work in the blockbuster hit.
Though he was associated with DeMille’s two epics and the Wyler Ben-Hur in the 1950s, Charlton Heston actually starred in more epic films in the 1960s than in the previous decade. But El Cid (1961), directed by Anthony Mann, was to be the last of his major hits in these spectaculars. His subsequent epics, 55 Days at Peking (1962), Major Dundee (a massacred epic, 1965), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), The War Lord (1965), and Khartoum (1966) were all box-office failures that garnered, at best, faint critical praise, though his performance in a low-budget western, Will Penny (1967), led critics to remark on Charlton Heston’s reserved dignity and vulnerability in a thoughtful, quiet film. The movie was a disappointment at the ticket window, however.
It appeared as if Charlton Heston’s movie career was in a serious slide until he starred in a most unlikely hit, Planet of the Apes (1968). He followed that success with a starring role in the sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), committing the producing studio, TWENTIETH CENTURY–FOX, to kill off his character so he couldn’t be called back for further sequels (of which there were three). Except for a couple of intriguing low-budget science-fiction cult films, The Omega Man (1970) and Soylent Green (1973), Charlton Heston buried himself during the 1970s in a series of all-star films such as Skyjacked (1972), Earthquake (1974), Airport 1975 (1975), and Two Minute Warning (1976) until his credibility as a serious actor began to erode. By the end of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, he surfaced in occasional movies, often scripted by his son, Fraser Heston, but they were not particularly successful or noteworthy.
In the 1980s, he starred in a miniseries on TV and then succumbed to the lure of prime-time TV soap operas, starring for a short while in The Colbys. Frequently sunk by his own gravitas, Charlton Heston has naturally been recruited for roles requiring much authority. In James Cameron’s True Lies (1994), for example, Charlton Heston’s character headed up a supersecret spy agency. In OLIVER STONE’s Any Given Sunday (1999), Charlton Heston played the football commissioner, and in 2001, he played a chimp elder (the wise old father of Tim Roth’s General Thade) in Tim Burton’s stylized remake of The Planet of the Apes.
The NRA recruited him as their spokesman for gun rights, inspiring some gun advocates to attach bumper stickers to their trucks, proclaiming “Charlton Heston Is My President.” Presumably out of good nature and in a spirit of fun, he went on to play a caricature of himself for WARREN BEATTY in Town and Country (2001), and in 2002, he was interviewed by journalist/documentarian Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine. Having been established as the face of the gun-rights advocates, he is interviewed and storms off in protest when he apparently is unable to answer some of Moore’s more pointed questions. Charlton Heston was quite good declaiming as the Player King in Kenneth Branagh’s all-star, epic Hamlet (1996) and was also effective as the evil poacher in Alaska (1996). In 2002, Charlton Heston announced that he was showing the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
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