HESTON, Charlton

(b. 4 October 1923 in Evanston, Illinois), Academy Award–winning screen and stage actor and narrator who starred as unforgettable historical figures or fictional heroes in numerous epic films and who, during the 1960s, was president of the Screen Actors Guild, a civil rights supporter, and an appointee on national arts programs.

Heston, the second of three children, was born John Charlton Carter to Russell Whitford Carter, a sawmill operator, and Lilla Charlton, a homemaker. Shortly after his birth, his family relocated from Chicago to Saint Helen, Michigan; about ten years later, his parents separated. After her divorce, Heston's mother married Chet Heston. Heston graduated from New Trier High School in Chicago in 1941 and then attended Northwestern University in Evanston from 1941 to 1943. (He did not graduate.) He served in the U.S. Army Air Force from 1943 to 1946. While stationed at Greensboro, North Carolina, he married Lydia Marie Clarke, a classmate from Northwestern, on 17 March 1944. They had two children. In 1946 they moved east, where in 1948 Heston debuted on Broadway as Praculeius in Shake-speare's Antony and Cleopatra and on television in Studio One plays. His first Hollywood film, Dark City (1950), initiated a decade of appearances in nearly twenty films, including two Cecil B. De Mille blockbusters, The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and The Ten Commandments (1956).

During the 1960s, Heston's handsome physique and classical profile assisted in elevating him as an epic American actor. He performed in The Tumbler, directed by Laurence Olivier, on Broadway in March 1960. Heston received the Academy Award in 1960 for best actor for the title role in William Wyler's Ben-Hur (1959). The Academy Awards ceremony had been preceded by a strike called by the president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), Ronald Reagan; Reagan soon asked Heston to join SAG's negotiating committee. Heston next began researching his role as Spain's great hero in El Cid (1961) and soon left for location filming abroad. In late May 1961 Heston joined a three-person civil rights demonstration outside an Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, restaurant. The group was picketing for desegregation of restaurants. As Heston said in The Actor's Life, he had come to a time and place in his life when he believed that it was time to act rather than simply deploring injustices at cocktail parties.

Overseas he viewed the "horrifying" contrasts between East and West Berlin when the U.S. Department of State Cultural Presentation Program sent him to the Berlin Film Festival in June and July that year. Near the end of July, Heston began shooting the World War II comedy The Pigeon That Took Rom e (1962) in Italy, where he received the David di Donatello Award in July 1961. On 13 November 1961 he was elected a vice president of SAG and testified on its behalf before Congress the next month. Heston made hand imprints in the cement outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on 18 January 1962 and throughout the year worked on two 1962 film releases: Diamond Head and 55 Days at Peking. In January 1963 and again that July, Heston was busy as SAG's negotiating committee chairman. His acting projects that year included the roles of John the Baptist in George Stevens's Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and Thomas Jefferson in The Patriots for Hallmark Hall of Fame and scenes from Mister Roberts (9 December) upon the twentieth anniversary of the New York City Center Theatre.

Heston played roles in two monumental events of 1963. The civil rights leader the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Heston considered "a twentieth-century Moses for his people," had upon occasion conferred with Heston about the need for integrating certain Hollywood technical unions. Heston helped form the Arts Group, along with fellow actors Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, James Garner, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier, to support King's civil rights march on Washington, D.C., on 28 August 1963. On Sunday 24 November, the eve of the funeral for President John F. Kennedy, Heston joined a handful of performers selected by the American Broadcasting Company to pay tribute to the assassinated president. Heston chose to recite parts of psalms from the Bible and poems by Robert Frost. Heston worked during 1964 on several films released the following year: a western, Major Dundee; Carol Reed's The Agony and the Ecstasy (as Michelangelo); and The War Lord (as a medieval warrior).

Politically independent, Heston wrote that up until the 1964 presidential election, he had cast 80 percent of his state and national votes for Democrats and had campaigned for Kennedy. But the 1964 slogan ("In your heart, you know he's right") for the Republican presidential candidate, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, convinced Heston that the Democratic Party had changed so much that it could no longer nominate a John F. Kennedy. He became a Republican. In March 1965 Heston participated in a Department of State cultural visit to Nigeria and in July achieved acclaim as Sir Thomas More in a Chicago production of his favorite non-Shakespeare play, Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. On the screen he played Charles Gordon in Khartoum (1966). Near the end of the year Heston was elected to his first of six terms as SAG's president (1965–1971). He remained proud of his negotiation work, frequent congressional testimony, public "ambassador" role in the U.S. and abroad, and his efforts in securing superior pension, welfare, and medical plans for SAG members.

Heston made his first of two United Service Organizations tours to Vietnam in January 1966 (the second was in September 1967). His special interaction with U.S. troops, particularly the wounded, was his promise to telephone their loved ones upon his return to the United States. During a limited 1966 U.S. tour, he repeated the role of Thomas More. His film project through early 1967 was playing a wartime conductor in Counterpoint (1968). On 12 December 1966 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Heston to a six-year term on the National Council on the Arts. Heston's 1967 film projects were a western, Will Penny (1967), and the box-office hit Planet of the Apes (1967). He performed opposite Judith Anderson in Maxwell Anderson's Elizabeth and Essex on the Columbia Broadcasting System's Hallmark Hall of Fame in October 1967. During 1968 he worked on two films released the following year, reprising his role as the futuristic astronaut George Taylor in Beneath the Planet of the Apes and playing an aging quarterback in Number One.

In tribute to the assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr., Heston narrated King—A Filmed Record … Montgomery to Memphis (1970). In 1969 Heston worked on two films released in 1970: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (as Marc Antony) and The Hawaiians, based on James A. Michener's novel Hawaii. In April he attended the weeklong tribute to his screen work at the British Film Institute. Certain California Democrats probed Heston about running for the U.S. Senate (as would Republicans in the early 1970s and in 1984), but he rejected the idea. Heston's resonant speaking voice provided the commentary for many shorts and commercial or federal promotional and documentary films during the 1960s, including The American Film (1967), directed by George Stevens, Jr., for the American Film Institute, and Rowan and Martin at the Movies (1969) for U.S. Treasury Bonds. Heston, an avid tennis player, narrated Rod Laver's Wimbledon in 1969.

Heston received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1978. In 1981 President Ronald W. Reagan appointed Heston cochairman of the Presidential Task Force on the Arts and Humanities. He was chairman of the American Film Institute from 1972 to 1982 and took on the presidency of the National Rifle Association in 1998. On 9 August 2002, Heston announced publicly that his doctors had confirmed that he had the early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, adding that he felt that it was important not to exclude his fans from this stage in his life. "I've lived my whole life on the stage and screen before you," he said. "For an actor, there is no greater loss than the loss of his audience."

The 1960s highlighted a sustained peak for Heston, particularly as a star of film epics, and the resulting renown made him a readily identifiable and crowd-attracting American celebrity at home and abroad. His acting versatility enabled him to embody both the American spirit of Robert Frost's best poems and the internationalized hero of biblical proportions.

The Charlton Heston Room at the Theater Arts Library of the University of California at Los Angeles contains memorabilia and other items donated since 1983 by Heston. Heston's autobiographical works are The Actor's Life: Journals, 1956–1976 (1978), with Hollis Alpert, ed.; In the Arena: An Autobiography (1995); and To Be a Man: Letters to My Grandson (1997). Beijing Diary (1990) refers to his directing for the Chinese Cultural Ministry, through the U.S. Department of State, an all-Chinese production in Beijing of Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny. Courage to Be Free (2000) relates to his responsibilities for the National Rifle Association. See also Jeff Rovin, The Films of Charlton Heston (1977); Bruce Crowther, Charlton Heston: The Epic Presence (1986); Michael Munn, Charlton Heston (1986); and Heston, with Jean-Pierre Isbouts, Charlton Heston's Hollywood: 50 Years of American Film (1998). Articles in the New York Times relating to Heston's activities during the 1960s include "Charlton Heston Heads U.S. Delegation to West Berlin International Film Festival" (23 June 1961); "Unionist Decries TV Music Imports" (3 Dec. 1961); Murray Schumach, "Heston Refunds Salary to Studio" (9 May 1964); and Robert E. Dallos, "City and State Rights Agencies Will Act on Bias" (27 Aug. 1968).

Madeline Sapienza