Charlton Heston, epic film star, dies at 83

CALIFORNIA, APRIL 6: Charlton Heston, who appeared in some 100 films in his 60-year acting career but who is remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo, died on Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was 83.

His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Bill Powers, who declined to discuss the cause. In August 2002, Heston announced that he had been diagnosed with neurological symptoms “consistent with Alzheimer’s disease”. “I’m neither giving up nor giving in,” he said.

Heston’s life changed forever when he caught the eye of the director Cecil B. De Mille. De Mille, who was planning his next biblical spectacular, The Ten Commandments, looked at the young, physically imposing Heston and saw his Moses. When the film was released in 1956, Heston became a marquee name. Whether leading the Israelites through the wilderness, parting the Red Sea or coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets from God in hand, he was a Moses to remember.

The same quality made Heston an effective spokesman, off-screen, for the causes he believed in. Late in life he became a staunch opponent of gun control. Elected president of the National Rifle Association in 1998, he proved to be a powerful campaigner against what he saw as the government’s attempt to infringe on a Constitutional guarantee—the right to bear arms.

In Heston, the NRA found its embodiment of pioneer values—pride, independence and valour. In a speech at the NRA’s annual convention in 2000, he brought the audience to its feet with a ringing attack on gun-control advocates. Paraphrasing an NRA bumper sticker (“I’ll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands”) he waved a replica of a colonial musket above his head and shouted defiantly, “From my cold, dead hands!”

In 1959, Heston stepped back into the world of the biblical epic, this time under the director William Wyler. The movie was Ben-Hur. Cast as a prince of ancient Judea who rebels against the rule of Rome, Heston again dominated the screen. In the film’s most spectacular sequence, he and his co-star, Stephen Boyd, as his Roman rival, fight a thrilling duel with whips as their horse-drawn chariots careen wheel-to-wheel around an arena filled with roaring spectators.

In 1965, he was cast as Michelangelo in the film version of Irving Stone’s novel The Agony and the Ecstasy. Directed by Carol Reed, the film pitted Heston’s temperamental artist against Rex Harrison’s testy Pope Julius II, who commissioned Michelangelo to create frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Heston’s performance took a critical drubbing, but to audiences, the larger-than-life role seemed to be another perfect fit. Heston once joked: “I have played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses. If that doesn’t create an ego problem, nothing does.”

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