Heston was born John Charles Carter in No Man's Land, an unincorporated area between Evanston and Wilmette, Illinois, the son of Lilla (née Charlton) and Russell Whitford Carter, a mill operator. (However, the 1930 Census for Richfield, Michigan (see St. Helen, Michigan), where the family then lived, reports Russell Whitford Carter was a real estate salesman. Heston himself in his autobiography refers only to his father participating in his family's construction business. Heston was of English and Scottish descent and a member of the Fraser clan.
When he was ten, his parents divorced. Shortly thereafter, his mother married Chester Heston. The new family moved to well-off Wilmette, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago. Heston (his new surname) attended New Trier High School.
Heston enrolled in New Trier's drama program, playing in the silent 16 mm amateur film adaptation of Peer Gynt by future film activist David Bradley. From the Winnetka Community Theatre in which he was active, he earned a drama scholarship to Northwestern University. Several years later Heston teamed up with Bradley to produce the first sound version of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in which Heston played Mark Antony.
In 1944, Heston enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces. He served for two years as a B-25 radio operator and gunner stationed in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands with the Eleventh Air Force, rising to the rank of Staff Sergeant. He married Northwestern student Lydia Marie Clarke in the same year.
After the war, the two lived in Hell's Kitchen, New York City, where they worked as artists' models. Seeking a way to make it in theater, Heston and his wife Lydia decided to manage a playhouse in Asheville, North Carolina in 1947. In 1948, they went back to New York where Heston was offered a supporting role in a Broadway revival of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, starring Katharine Cornell. Heston had success in television, playing a number of roles in CBS's Studio One, one of the most popular anthology dramas of the 1950s. Film producer Hal B. Wallis of Casablanca spotted Heston in a 1950 television production of Wuthering Heights and offered him a contract. When his wife reminded Heston they had decided to pursue theater and television, he replied, "Well, maybe just for one film to see what it's like."
Heston's most frequently played roles on stage include the title role in Macbeth, Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, and Mark Antony in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.
Heston earned recognition for his appearance in his first professional movie, Dark City, a 1950 film noir. His breakthrough came when Cecil B. DeMille cast him as a circus manager in The Greatest Show on Earth, which was named by the Motion Picture Academy as the best picture of 1952. In 1953, Heston was Billy Wilder's first choice to play Sefton in Stalag 17. However, the role was given to William Holden, who won an Oscar for it. Heston became an icon for portraying Moses in The Ten Commandments, reportedly being chosen by director Cecil B. DeMille because he thought the muscular, 6 ft 3 in, square jawed Heston bore an uncanny resemblance to Michelangelo's statue of Moses
After Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster and Rock Hudson turned down the title role of Ben-Hur (1959), Heston accepted the role, going on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, one of the unprecedented eleven Oscars the film earned. (In 1995, Heston denied a claim by Ben-Hur screenwriter Gore Vidal that there is a gay subtext to the film. Vidal says he wrote the script with such an implication, but never mentioned the subtext to Heston [though he did so to Stephen Boyd, who played Ben-Hur's friend Messala]. Heston states that after writing one scene, Vidal was dismissed from the project and the homosexuality story is a reworking by Vidal of a well-known and possibly apocryphal story involving Laurence Olivier's portrayal of Iago to an unwitting Ralph Richardson as Othello.) After Moses and Ben-Hur, Heston was identified with Biblical epics more than any other actor. He voiced the role of a cartoon version of the Lew Wallace novel in 2003.
Heston went on to leading roles in a number of fictional and historical epics- El Cid (1961), 55 Days at Peking (1963), as Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965),The Greatest Story Ever Told as John Baptist(1966), and Khartoum (1966).
In 1965, Heston became president of the Screen Actors Guild. He remained in the position until 1971, the second longest tenure to date in that office.
In 1968, he starred in the hugely successful Planet of the Apes. In 1970, Heston portrayed Mark Antony again in a Technicolor film version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. His co-stars in the nearly all-star cast included Jason Robards as Brutus, Richard Chamberlain as Octavius, Robert Vaughn as Casca, and English actors Richard Johnson as Cassius, John Gielgud as Caesar, and Diana Rigg as Portia. In 1971 he starred in the science fiction film, The Omega Man. Although critically panned, the film is now considered a classic of apocalyptic horror. In 1972 Heston made his directorial debut, and starred, as Mark Antony in an adaptation of the William Shakespeare play he performed earlier in his theater career, Antony and Cleopatra. Hildegarde Neil was Cleopatra, and English actor Eric Porter was Enobarbus. After receiving scathing reviews, the film never went to theaters, and rarely turns up on television. It has not been released on DVD. He subsequently starred in successful films such as Soylent Green (1973), and Earthquake (1974).
Beginning with playing Cardinal Richelieu in 1973's The Three Musketeers, Heston was seen in an increasing number of supporting roles, cameos and theater. From 1985 to 1987, he starred in his only prime-time stint on series television with the soap, The Colbys. With his son Fraser, he produced and also starred in several TV movies, including remakes of Treasure Island and A Man For All Seasons. In 1992, Heston appeared in a short series of videos on the A&E cable network reading passages from the King James Version of the Bible, called Charlton Heston Presents the Bible. It was filmed in the Middle East and received excellent reviews, achieving great success on video and DVD. In 1993, he appeared in a cameo role in Wayne's World 2 (in a scene wherein main character Wayne Campbell (Mike Myers) requests that a small role be filled by a better actor). That same year, he hosted Saturday Night Live. He had cameos in the films Hamlet, Tombstone and True Lies. He especially worked at the Los Angeles Music Center where he appeared in such plays as Detective Story, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, and as Sherlock Holmes in The Crucifer of Blood opposite Jeremy Brett as Dr. Watson, later winning acclaim for his interpretation of the famous detective in a television version. In 2001, Heston made a cameo appearance as an elderly, dying chimpanzee in Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes. Heston's last film role was as the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in My Father, Rua Alguem 5555, which had limited release (mainly to festivals) in 2003.
Heston played the title role in Mister Roberts three times and cited it as one of his favorite roles. In the early '90s, he tried unsuccessfully to revive and direct the show with Tom Selleck in the title role.
Charlton Heston Died April 5th 2008
