There has been plenty of untimely deaths so far this year, but last night saw the death of one of Hollywood’s biggest actors, Charlton Heston. He had spent his later years battling with Alzheimer’s Disease.
After enlisting in the US Air Force, Heston started his career on the stage, appearing in Broadway plays as well as getting several TV roles. His transition to cinema came directly through theatre, starring as Marc Antony in the 1950 version of Julius Caesar. He returned to the same role 20 years later when directing Antony and Cleopatra.
Heston is mostly known for playing larger-than-life historical and Biblical figures. The most important role of his early career was as Moses in the Cecil B Demille epic The Ten Commandments. The image of Moses parting the Red Sea will always be associated with Heston’s face. In 1960 Heston starred in another period epic, this time in Ben-Hur, which earned a Best Actor Oscar, as well as numerous others for the film.
Heston was also known for appearing in gritt, noir-ish thrillers. The best of which was Orson Welles’s astounding Touch of Evil. Heston played Vargas, a Mexican police officer on the US border, battling hoods and dirty cops, his idealism getting him and his wife into trouble. It is this role in which I will always remember the actor.
After his Oscar, Heston continued to play historical characters, from El Cid to John the Baptist, to Michaelangelo. But in 1967 Heston started a new phase of his career, and gained a new type of audience. Planet of the Apes became an instant classic, and everyone recognises the “you filthy apes” and “damn you all to hell” snarls of the film (Heston went on to parody them in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of the film). Heston went on to star in The Omega Man (recently remade into I am Legend), and Soylent Green, a film which proposed that the government solved overpopulation by serving people as food.
While Heston’s later career failed to make much of an impact (films like Earthquake are not really remembered now), he did appear in the popular soap Dynasty, as was considered good enough to star in a spin-off series called The Colbys, which ran for almost 50 episodes.
Heston made brief appearence in films during the 90’s, but his career was overshadowed by his political views, which were known to be very conservative (despite being for civil rights long before “it became popular”). He was upset at the notion of Ben Hur being potentially homosexual after writer Gore Vidal revealed it. He was President of the National Rifle Association, a role that caused much negative attention, especially Michael Moore’s popular documentary Bowling for Columbine. The film depits Heston is a negative light, to say the least, as an insensitive man.
Regardless of his dubious political beliefs, Heston will be an actor remembered for his passion and presence on screen, and as the man said himself: “If you need a ceiling painted, a chariot race run, a city besieged, or the Red Sea parted, you think of me.”