No Wolf - I do not think you are blowing the matter out of proportion. Here you go. Behold the man. All- American and an inspiration. R.I.P.
I HAVE LIVED SUCH A WONDERFUL LIFE
By Michael Freedland
BORN October 4, 1923; died April 5, 2008.
He wanted people to call him Chuck.
That way, decided Charlton Heston, who died at the weekend aged 84, he would be remembered as one of the guys, one of the fellows who liked nothing better than donning a pair of jeans, a check shirt and going out into the woods, a rifle at his side.
.Read the Old Testament and he was Moses, or even God Himself, as he provided the voiceover in The Ten Commandments. You couldn’t imagine the man who crossed the Red Sea looking like anyone else. Read the story of the Romans in ancient Israel portrayed in Ben Hur and it was Heston who was always the obvious choice.
And what about Michelangelo? The great Sistine Chapel artist must have looked like Heston – didn’t he? As the actor once remarked: “I have a face that belongs in another century.
When, in August 2002, Heston announced in an internationally networked video that he had Alzheimer’s disease it was considered to be totally in character, a brave gesture from a man for whom courage on screen was his stock in trade.
The blue collar workers of America, for whom having a gun to take out on a hunting expedition was very near a religious experience, adored him.
Yet there was another side to his political philosophy. Surprisingly, in the Sixties when he was at the peak of his powers and his popularity, he was at the forefront of the civil rights movement. He saw no contradiction in that. “I believe in promoting freedom in the truest sense,” he said. He marched alongside Martin Luther King a number of times and narrated the documentary, King: A Filmed Record… Montgomery To Memphis.
But certainly, it was his attitude to guns that put him so far to the Right in the political spectrum. As president of the NRA from 1998 to 2003, he was seen as the patron saint of working men who upheld the right to bear arms. As far as Heston was concerned, it was the one part of the US Constitution that had to be honoured almost above all others. “It’s my right and I’ll go to my death upholding that right,” he said.
He was in the US Army Air Corps for three years, after which he made his stage debut in stock productions. His first Broadway appearance was as a member of the cast of Katharine Cornell’s version of Antony And Cleopatra in 1947.
Heston made his professional film debut in DarkCity in 1950 and two years later had his first mega role in circus movie The Greatest Show On Earth. The Ten Commandments came in 1956 after a series of lesser roles in pictures including Pony Express, Lucy Gallant and Bad For Each Other.
His strength and his incredible bone structure set him out as someone who commanded attention.
His Oscar-winning Ben Hur in 1959 came after Touch Of Evil and The Big Country. In 1961 he played the title role in the Spanish-based epic El Cid. Two years later he appeared as an American officer in the Boxer revolt in China in Fifty Five Days At Peking.
He was back in the Bible in 1964, portraying John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told, and the following year played Michelangelo in The Agony And The Ecstasy.
In the movie Khartoum in 1966, he gave a stunning performance as the British General Gordon. But it was his role in The Planet Of The Apes in 1968 that again awarded him the superstar treatment he had taken as his right after The Ten Commandments. But there was no doubt he looked good in costume, which was why, as Cardinal Richelieu, he stole the show in an otherwise indifferent The Three Musketeers in 1975.
.Most of his television work, however, centred on his passion for fighting gun control and speaking on behalf of the Republican party.
There was plenty of drama in his personal life. In the Nineties both he and his wife Lydia, whom he married in 1944, suffered from cancer. At the end of that decade, years of heavy drinking seemed to take their toll and he spent three weeks drying out in a rehab clinic in Utah.
His memoirs, The Actor’s Life, were published in 1978 before he was able to come to terms with the problem. He and Lydia, who was at his bedside when he died, had two children – a son, Fraser Clarke Heston, a film director, and a daughter Holly, who they adopted because they wanted to guarantee one child of each sex.
Heston’s death, following The family released a statement yesterday, in his own words. It said: “I have lived such a wonderful life! I’ve lived enough for two people.”
Heston wrote the last line of El Cid himself, when the producers were agonising about how to finish off the epic movie with a suitable flourish.
The line was intoned by a narrator: “And so the Cid rode out of history – into legend!”
Maybe, just maybe, one could say the same of Charlton Heston today.
