charlton heston

Charlton Heston was born John Charles Carter in Wilmette, Illinois.  The family briefly moved to St. Helen, Michigan but, after his parents divorced, Heston moved back to Wilmette with his mother, sister and brother.  His mother remarried and Heston acquired a new surname.  Exactly when Charlton became his first name is not clear, although the 1930 Census shows his name as Charlton J. Carter in Richfield, Michigan.  The name was his maternal grandmother’s last name.

Heston later recounted how he wandered the wood of northern Michigan acting out the characters from the books he had read.  Back in Illinois, he took part in the drama program and earned a scholarship to Northwestern University.  He attended for several years before enlisting in the Army Air Corps and serving as a radio operator and gunner on B-25 bombers flying out of the Aleutian Islands.  He later held a top-secret clearance for many years so that he could narrate instructional videos related to nuclear weapons.   Prior to enlisting, he also married fellow Northwestern student Lydia Marie Clarke.

When World War II ended, the Hestons moved to New York where Charlton sought work in the theater.  Eventually, he won several television roles in Shakespearean dramas and was offered a film contract by Hal Wallis after his role in a 1950 television production of Wuthering Heights.  His first film role was in the film noir Dark City (1950), but his big break came when he played circus manager Brad Braden in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952).  The film won the best picture Oscar in 1952 and was one of the most popular films of the year.  Heston next starred in a series of westerns before another production with DeMille made Charlton Heston a film icon.

The Ten Commandments (1956) was one of the greatest box office successes of all time.  Adjusted for inflation, it remains the eighth highest grossing film of all time.  It also became an all-time favorite, enjoying annual showings on primetime television for many years.  Heston’s performance as Moses was critically acclaimed both for his portrayal of the princely young Moses and the patriarchal older Moses.  Four years later, Heston followed up this performance with another iconic performance in Ben-Hur (1959), a film that won a record eleven Oscars, including Best Actor for Charlton Heston.

The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur were only two of the epics that Heston starred in throughout the 1950s and 1960s.  He played John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), the title characters in El Cid (1961) and Major Dundee (1965), Michaelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), and General Charles Gordon in Khartoum (1966).  Charlton Heston was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood by the late 1960s and was about to embark on an unlikely career as an action hero. 

Planet of the Apes (1968) (read our review) became the next iconic role for Charlton Heston.  The film was critically acclaimed, led to several immediate sequels, a television series and a successful reboot over thirty years later.  In addition to a cameo in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Heston spent the next several years starring in a series of science fiction films including The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973) and disaster movies including Earthquake (1974), Airport 1975 (1975), Two Minute Warning (1976) and Gray Lady Down (1978).  He also starred in the war film Midway (1976). 

Heston remained active in his later years on screen, in the theater and in politics.  A liberal in his early life and a strong supporter of civil rights throughout the 1960s, Heston became a conservative Republican and an advocate of gun rights and other conservative causes in his later years.  Eventually, he rose to a position of leadership in the National Rifle Association.  In 2002, he publicly announced that he had been diagnosed with symptoms consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.  He died on April 5, 2008, from pneumonia. 

Charlton Heston was larger than life in many ways.  When epics became the norm in Hollywood, his voice, stature and mannerisms made him the perfect actor to play roles like Moses, Ben-Hur and El Cid.  It is hard to imagine anyone else playing those characters.  He starred in three of the most watched films of all time and any movie lover will eventually see The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur and Planet of the Apes.  He also spoke some of the most memorable lines in movie history.  No one forgets “Let my people go,” “Get your stinking paws off of me, you damned dirty ape,” or “Soylent Green is people” after seeing those films.