Charlton Heston died on Saturday night, April 5 2008, at the age of 84 at his home in Beverly Hills, California.
Read the New York Times obituary here and Los Angeles Times obit here. A complete list of his credits are here on the IMDb. More links at GreenCine Daily here.
Heston was a American actor whose commanding presence defined his characters, a beefy slab of American leading man who anchored many an epic with the strength of his sturdy physical bearing anchored on the foundation of an intent gravelly voice and given life with eyes that focused his resolve into a dare. He was the human rock upon which films such as The Greatest Show on Earth, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, El Cid, 55 Days at Peking and Planet of the Apes were built upon. But he was also a classically trained actor with great pride in his craft and he interspersed his Hollywood epics and genre pictures with excursions into Shakespeare (like Julius Caesar in 1970 and his 1972 Antony and Cleopatra, which he also directed). And he proved himself a solid character actor with strong supporting turns in films as The Bog Country and Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, playing the scheming Cardinal Richelieu with an almost bemused attitude.
Off screen, Heston was also quite famous for his work in the NRA. He was a legitimate target of the left for his outspoken views on gun control, but he could also be quite self-effacing about his politics – his appearance as a guest host on Saturday Night Live in 1993 included an NRA spoof as well as skits built around Planet of the Apes and Moses from The Ten Commandments. In his final years, he also suffered from a condition similar to Alzheimer’s since 2002, which makes Michael Moore’s ambush of Heston in the documentary Bowling For Columbine, which ended with Moore railing against Heston (who had long since left the scene so Moore could place his camera where Heston had been), a fairly despicable act on all levels.
I have no single favorite Heston role, but in 1998 I had the rare pleasure of interviewing Mr. Heston for the release of the Walter Murch-supervised “restoration” of Touch of Evil (1958), based on the detailed notes give to the studio by Orson Welles (and largely ignored at the time). It was supposed to be the center of a essay on the film, but the article was canceled and the review never published. I publish it here for the first time.
I’ve been doing some research and I’ve read your journals and autobiography where you go into magnificent detail on the making of Touch of Evil.
Well thank you.
So I wanted to talk about some other things that I haven’t heard you talk about in interviews or read about in your books. One thing that struck me as I read your piece was that it seems like you had quite a rapport with Orson Welles.
Yes, that’s true. I had never known him before but of course I had see Citizen Kane and for that matter I’d seen Othello. And his reputation then as a filmmaker then was remarkable. I was amazed that the studio, when I suggested he direct the picture, they acted as though I’d suggested directing the picture but his work on the film was extraordinary, I thought.
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