Charlton Heston dead at 84
By BOB THOMAS
LOS ANGELES - Charlton Heston, who won the 1959 best actor Oscar as the chariot-racing "Ben-Hur" and portrayed Moses, Michelangelo, El Cid and other heroic figures in movie epics of the '50s and '60s, has died. He was 84.
The actor died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills with his wife Lydia at his side, family spokesman Bill Powers said.
Powers declined to comment on the cause of death or provide further details.
Heston revealed in 2002 that he had symptoms consistent with Alzheimer's disease, saying, "I must reconcile courage and surrender in equal measure."
With his large, muscular build, well-boned face and sonorous voice, Heston proved the ideal star during the period when Hollywood was filling movie screens with panoramas depicting the religious and historical past. "I have a face that belongs in another century," he often remarked.
...
Couldn't stand the man's politics, and this was about as close as he was ever going to get to setting foot in Dirty Fucking Hippyville,
but for most of his life that wasn't his job.
His job was being up there on screen, 800 feet tall, slinging more fine, smoked ham than William Shatner and Adam West between them
could even dream of.
In addition to the beefcaking up the bible and assorted other epics, with "Planet of the Apes"
"Soylent Green"
and "The Omega Man" (featuring one of the very first Big Cinema interracial kisses), Heston also briefly carved out a niche for himself as one of on-screen science fiction's go-to guys when casting the reluctant, misanthropic hero stuck in an ugly future and hanging on by his nails.
RIP Chuck: If you'd never been born the creators of Cinemascope would have had to invent you.
15 comments:
That's all fine and well. But. His nra bullshit canceled all that out for me. All of it. I got nothing.
We were just lucky he was never Prez of SAG, Gov Of CA or Prez of USA. They coulda been interchangeable, for that matter. ;-)
I watched my mother die of Alzheimer's. For that, I just say, RIP Mr. Heston. I'm not sure if it's as bad for the victim, as it is for those who watch it take place. It's ugly.
We don't need no celluloid heroes no more. We need the real deal.
Go Obama.
N god DANG, Memphis State is incredible. They beat the SHIT out of my last CA team UCLA today and made it look easy, too.
Memphis by 22 over Kansas, too much size inside by Memphis.
Tan, you lurking? *G*
Drifty, my bad, let me acknowledge Great post, and your last line is a closer of a decade. How you do that, hoss . . . ;-)
couldnt really act ---- and his NRA acting was just another reason to hate his movies
but he did make some good ones
including Touch of Evil, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green.
his one line from POTA sums it up
Taylor: It's a mad house. A mad house.
Wait a damn minute... He JUST DIED?! I must needs say, I'm in disbelief. I thought he'd passed into the cold, dead Planet of the Soylent Apes long ago. Maybe sometime not too long after Bowling For Columbine. What was he waiting for?
Yeah but guys? Bowling for Columbine was his best performance. That's the irony.
Larue,
Heston actually WAS the president of the SAG - six times in fact. I remember that because later (80s?) he got into it with the (then) current SAG president Edward Asner. Asner is a real liberal.
FWIW, just like St. Ronnie before him, Heston started out as a Democrat and campaigned for Kennedy, marched for civil rights, etc. Shame that he wacked out and became a looney-tune Republican.
I guess this isn't the moment for jokes about what to do with the gun pried from his cold, dead hands?
that's the ticket drifty. i thought his politics odious myself, and his acting was, shall we say, marginal, but when it came to holding his own on the spectacle sets. he fucking did that.
heston's actor's diary which is culled from the diaries he kept during the shooting of every movie and the run of every stage show should be required reading for thespians.
The foibles of the religious brain, the political brain, and Alzheimer's brain all seem to be related.
“It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.”
- Robert Anton Wilson
He will live as long as people quote movies.
How many times have we had occasion to cry out,
"Soylent Green is people!"
"Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!"
Well, I get these occasions.
And I do.
Back when I was 12 and the hormones first jumped, spectacle movies were my true church. Heston was God and Sex in one package.
Years later I saw him as a young (!) man opposite Orson Welles in that movie whose name I can never remember ... Edge of ... the Bathtub? My Cheekbone? Anyway, I thought, Damn, that kid is one crazy cockful of cinematic energy.
Years later than that, I saw him as the Player King in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. I thought, Why didn't you stay onstage with Shakespeare, you big nut? Anybody can do guns. But the Bard, he NEEDS you!
But drifty nailed it in his post's last line. Heston and Cinemascope were born to be together.
The bottom line: he was a lousy actor.
I disagree: Put him in the right vehicle, like Will Penny, and Heston could turn in a very creditable performance. He also did an admirable job in the first film he made with director Franklin Schaffner: The War Lord. (Planet of the Apes was their second collaboration.)
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