Obituaries

The towering actor who parted the Red Sea

Charlton Heston

1924–2008

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Charlton Heston, one of the most commanding performers in film history, made his reputation playing iconic characters in epic films. In more than 100 movies, the tall, muscled, and deep-voiced actor embodied such heroic, larger-than-life figures as Moses, John the Baptist, Michaelangelo, and El Cid. “If you need a ceiling painted, a chariot race run, a city besieged, or the Red Sea parted,’’ Heston once remarked, “you think of me.” In his later years, Heston—a traditionalist disenchanted by the direction of American society—became more well known for his conservative political activity, including his outspoken defense of the right to bear arms.

Heston didn’t always cut an imposing figure, said The Washington Post. Raised in the Chicago suburbs, the son of a lumber-mill owner, he was “a shy loner” who preferred the solitary pursuits of hunting and fishing. “Gangly, pimply, and ill-dressed,” he was “stuck with the nickname ‘Moose’ because of his already deep voice.” Gradually, he “outgrew his physical awkwardness” and began appearing in community theater, later studying drama at Northwestern University and serving in World War II. Afterward, he found steady work in New York on live television and “began his Hollywood career as a replacement for Burt Lancaster in the gambling drama Dark City (1950).” Three years later, he won wide attention as a hard-­driving circus manager in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth.

“Heston made 10 films in the next three years,” said the London Times. Then DeMille cast him again, as Moses, in The Ten Commandments. When he parted the Red Sea with his outstretched arms, his white hair flowing, he became permanently known as a portrayer of near-mythic characters. “If you can’t make a career out of two DeMilles,” Heston quipped, “you’ll never make it.” He followed up with Orson Welles’ “minor classic” Touch of Evil (1958) and, after impressing director William Wyler in The Big Country (1958), found himself cast by Wyler as the title character of Ben-Hur (1959). The huge movie was “a gamble to save MGM’s ailing finances” and lure audiences back to theaters from their TV sets. “Wyler’s instinct to cast Heston as the brawny, kindly Ben-Hur proved right.” His sensitive yet action-packed portrayal of a Jewish prince at the time of Jesus—which featured him in a legendarily thrilling chariot race—won him the 1959 Academy Award for Best Actor.

“No movie star ever looked like more of an athlete than Heston,” said the Baltimore Sun. Standing 6-foot-2, he had a “comic-book wedge of a torso, a Dick Tracy–square jaw, and a competitive glint in his eye.” To this he added a booming voice and a unique talent “for italicizing his own physicality and magnetizing everything around him.” He was “stoically magnetic” in the Sam Peckinpah Western Major Dundee (1965); as the doomed Gen. George Gordon in Khartoum (1966), he spent his last moments “staring down the Mahdi’s spears unarmed, in an attempt to conjure his own charismatic miracle.” But Heston always tried to imbue his outsize performances with authenticity. He memorized biblical passages in preparing for The Ten Commandments; to play Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), he learned to paint and sculpt. He professed to never being fully satisfied with his work. “You never get it right,” he said. “Never once was it the way I imagined it lying awake at 4 o’clock in the morning.”

“Of course, in a career as active as Heston’s, there were many mediocrities,” said the Chicago Tribune, among them such disaster flicks as Earthquake (1974) and Airport 1975 and “leaden comedies like The Pigeon That Took Rome (1962).” Later in his career, he became synonymous with apocalyptic features. Heston was an angry, defiant defender of the human race in the science fiction classic Planet of the Apes (1968), the last man on earth in The Omega Man (1971), and a cop who saves the world’s surplus population from being turned into cheap food in Soylent Green (1973). He would eventually parody his granitic, jut-jawed persona in True Lies (1994) and on Saturday Night Live. “But on balance, Heston strove for prestige

and quality.”

That prestige allowed him to move into the political arena, said USA Today. Calling Martin Luther King Jr. “a 20th-century Moses for his people,” Heston actively supported the civil-rights movement and famously joined King’s march on Washington in 1963. He was also president of the Screen Actors Guild for a record five years, from 1966 to 1971. But beginning in 1964, “when he backed presidential candidate Barry Goldwater,” he responded to the country’s growing anti-establishment mood by moving increasingly right. “Heston, like Ronald Reagan, claimed the Democratic Party left him while his values remained the same.” After Senate Democrats blocked the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, he became a Republican. A “cultural war” was being waged in America, he declared, by what he called “the homosexual coalition, the feminists who preach that it is the divine duty of women to hate men, blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand while they seek preference with the other.”

His strongest voice was reserved for defending the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms, said The New York Times. First elected president of the National Rifle Association in 1998, he led the group for an unprecedented four one-year terms. At the NRA’s 2000 convention, Heston memorably raised a Colonial musket in the air and roared that gun-control advocates would have to wrest the weapon “from my cold, dead hands!” Two years later, in his documentary Bowling for Columbine, director Michael Moore asked Heston “how he could defend his pro-gun stance” following the 1999 massacre at the high school of the film’s title. “Heston ended the interview without comment.”

By then, Heston was exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and, in August 2002, he released a videotaped statement explaining his deteriorating condition. Vowing that he was “neither giving up nor giving in,” he concluded, “For an actor, there is no greater loss than the loss of his audience. I can part the Red Sea, but I can’t part with you.... If you see a little less spring to my step, if your name fails to leap to my lips, you’ll know why. And if I tell you a funny story for the second time, please laugh anyway.”