Charlton Heston, who has died aged 84, was an actor of towering physique who was in constant demand to play epic heroes in Hollywood movies of the 1950s and 1960s; he was, later in life, almost as well-known for his staunchly Right-wing stance, especially in his role as president of America’s National Rifle Association.
Among his many epic roles, Heston played Moses in Cecil B DeMille’s 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments, the title roles in Ben-Hur (1959) and El Cid (1961), Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) and General Gordon in Khartoum (1966).
Though Bibical parts comprised only a small fraction of his work — apart from Moses, he was John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) — he came to be seen as Hollywood’s resident Man of God and late in life narrated a series for television introducing stories from the Bible. From this, perhaps, stemmed the mistaken impression that he had actually portrayed God on screen.
Second to historical figures, he had a penchant for science fiction and appeared regularly in this genre in films that have since attained a cult reputation. He was the astronaut in the original Planet of the Apes (1968) who discovers that the gorilla-dominated world in which he has landed is actually Earth aeons after a nuclear holocaust. In 2001 he took a cameo role as an ageing ape in Tim Burton’s remake.
In The Omega Man (1971), based on Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, he played the last man on Earth after presumably a different nuclear holocaust has turned everybody else into albino, blood-sucking zombies. Soylent Green (1973), based on Harry Harrison’s story Make Room! Make Room!, imagined an alternative, polluted future in which nutrients are supplied by green tablets supposedly made of soya beans and lentils (and called soylent green). In fact, as Heston discovers in the film, they are processed from the recycled flesh of corpses because in a sunless world no vegetables will grow. In 1990 Heston made a further sf saga in Japan known as Solar Crisis, but it turned out badly, was attributed to the pseudonymous director Allen Smithee and consigned straight to video.
He was an actor of limited range, renowned in real life for lacking a sense of humour. Ventures into comedy such as The Private War of Major Benson (1955) and The Pigeon That Took Rome (1962) were conspicuous failures, though he had an amusing guest spot in Wayne’s World 2 (1993) demonstrating to comedian Mike Myers the art of under-acting.
Long active in politics, Heston was of rigorously conservative persuasion, though – like his great friend Ronald Reagan – he had begun his involvement in politics as a moderate Democrat who campaigned for Adlai Stevenson, voted for John F Kennedy in 1961 and attended Martin Luther King’s march on Washington.
n later life, however, he made no bones about his position. “Yep, today I am about as Right-wing as a man can be,” he proudly told The Daily Telegraph’s Jan Moir in 1999. “They don’t come any more Right-wing than me.” He supported the Gulf War and opposed both a nuclear freeze and any moves to curtail the individual’s right to bear firearms. Six times president of the Screen Actors Guild, he fought long and bitter battles with the liberal comedian Ed Asner over what he saw as attempts to politicise the union.
But Heston was not the unreconstructed reactionary his opponents sometimes portrayed. He campaigned on occasion for Democrats as well as Republicans and remained an active champion of the civil rights movement, prepared to stand on line in protests with actors much farther to the political Left than he. His interest in the right to bear arms was matched by a defence of other civil liberties, all rooted in an almost religious reverence for the American Bill of Rights.
Could he, like Ronald Reagan, have become a politician? Possibly, but he would have had to give up acting, which meant more to him. “I’d rather play a senator than be one,” he said. Or, indeed, a president, such as Andrew Jackson, whom he played twice in The President’s Lady (1953) and The Buccaneer (1958); Thomas Jefferson (in The Patriot); or the voice of FDR in a TV series.
Of English and Scottish descent, Charlton Heston was born Charles Carter on October 4 1923 at Evanston, Illinois, and grew up at St Helen, Michigan, where his father, Russell Carter, owned a lumber mill. After his parents divorced in the mid-1930s, his mother remarried Chester Heston, a heating appliance superintendent. As an actor, Charlton Heston later assumed his mother’s maiden name (Lilla Charlton) and his step-father’s surname, but preferred to be called “Chuck” — a nickname that stuck and by which he was happy to be known by friends and strangers alike.
His education was conventional — Stolp Grammar School at Evanston, New Trier High School at Winnetka, Illinois, and Northwestern University, where he enjoyed his first experience of film acting in the title role of a 16mm silent production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1942), directed by the independent film-maker David Bradley.
