Charlton Heston: THE ACTOR Charlton Heston, who has died after suffering from Alzheimer's disease aged 84, possessed ambition, screen presence, a fine physique, chiselled jaw and an outstanding voice.
He also demonstrated a liking for the classics and heroic characters, and a determination to survive. His professional survival lasted well over 50 years, and he famously played Ben-Hur, for which he won an Oscar, US presidents, Moses, Gen Gordon, Michelangelo and God (twice), alongside more mundane roles.
He had been active in civil rights issues in the 1950s, and was long involved with the Screen Actors Guild and the American Film Institute. In the late 1960s his politics moved significantly to the right, and his conservatism and support of the gun lobby left him open to criticism. However, none of this seemed to worry him or modify his resolute opposition to political correctness.
No actor has made a screen debut more prescient than his. Aged just 18, he starred in Peer Gynt, in a silent version of Ibsen's play accompanied by Grieg's music and given modest coherence by the use of intertitles. The youthful director, David Bradley, filmed his gangling, handsome star in wooded glades splashed by waterfalls and wearing scanty costumes. Seen today, it looks like the softest of soft porn.
Bradley made amends years later by casting Heston in a more suitable role as Mark Antony in a more coherent version of a great play, Julius Caesar (1950).
The film reveals his star as a young man now matured into the serious, sturdy, bass-voiced actor who was to make a further 60 features, numerous television films and series, and be both a stage actor and director of distinction.
Heston was born Charles Carter in Chicago, and when his parents divorced and his mother remarried he took his stepfather's name. He began acting at school, studied his craft at Northwestern University, made his extraordinary screen debut, and soon after had his would-be career interrupted by the war. He served for three years in the US air force as a B-25 radio operator and towards the end of his service finally persuaded his youthful sweetheart - Lydia Clarke - to marry him.
It proved a lifelong commitment, and she became the bedrock of his life and work. Although Lydia remained an actor, she largely forsook her career to be a wife, and mother to Fraser and Holly. However, during the immediate postwar years she and Chuck, as he has invariably been called, lived in New York and acted on stage there and throughout the country.
Heston's break came with the emergence of live television, which gave a horde of actors experience and employment in modern and classic plays. Heston played Antony, for television, and again soon after for Bradley in the film shot in Chicago. He also played Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Macbeth, and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. The pay was low and the work hard, but by 1950 he was an experienced actor whose destiny was Hollywood.
His debut was the thriller Dark City and during the next two years he acted in The Savage and a heated melodrama, Ruby Gentry (1952). But it was the oft-quoted sighting by Cecil B DeMille that secured him the role as circus manager in The Greatest Show on Earth. The film proved a smash hit and led to 10 films in three years.
The Ten Commandments (1956), in which he played Moses, set the seal on his work and gave him the ability to choose his roles, generally with care and acumen.
Director William Wyler gave him his most important break - the title role in Ben-Hur (1959). A vast, exhausting part, it won Heston the Oscar for best actor and set him in a class apart. His physique (Heston had been a youthful footballer and played tennis throughout his life) and broken-nosed, granite face became associated ever afterwards with historical characters.
In June 1998, Heston was elected president of the US National Rifle Association (NRA), for which he had posed for advertisements holding a rifle. He delivered a jab at then president Bill Clinton, saying: "America doesn't trust you with our 21-year-old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don't trust you with our guns."
He stepped down as NRA president in April 2003, the year he was awarded the presidential medal of freedom.
Heston made no apology for his rightist views. His belief in the individual and his nonconformity was reflected in many of his preferred stage characters, from Holmes to Thomas More to James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night and, of course, Antony.
A French critic once described Heston as the axiom of cinema, but the reviewer who noted that if Heston had not existed then Hollywood would have needed to invent him probably got near the truth.
"There was an epic, Everest-like quality to the man and many of the characters he played. He may not have counted as one of the wonders of the world, but he was surely an imposing part of its landscape."
He is survived by his wife and children.
Charlton Heston (Charles Carter): born October 4th, 1923; died April 5th, 2008