The Lion in Winter. Heston in his last years.

"From start to finish, Heston was a grand, ornery anachronism, the sinewy symbol of a time when Hollywood took itself seriously, when heroes came from history books, not comic books. Epics like Ben-Hur or El Cid simply couldn't be made today, in part because popular culture has changed as much as political fashion. But mainly because there's no one remotely like Charlton Heston to infuse the form with his stature, fire and guts." — Richard Corliss, Time magazine, December 2014

Charlton Heston’s centennial was a couple of days ago. I’ve been having the usual connectivity issues—living out in the wilderness has its downsides—but there is no way I could let this anniversary pass. Heston was that titanic in his field and he was that admirable as a man.

I did a short post on Mr. Heston earlier this year. I pledged to dig deeper this time around and I'll attempt to do so. There's no shortage of raw material. Charlton appeared in one hundred movies, performed in well over a hundred TV episodes and programs and also wrote seven books. 'A Man for All Seasons', indeed.

He was born John Charles Carter on October 4, 1923 in No Man's Land, Illinois. His parents were working class. As a boy, he spent much of his spare time outdoors. This preference for the real world, as opposed to being caged within walls, was reflected in the majority of his acting roles. The future Charlton Heston was also fairly solitary--something, once again, reflected in his later roles as a iron-willed man at odds with the society around him When he was ten years old, his parents divorced. Shortly thereafter, his mother married Chester Heston. Thus, his stage name 'Charlton Heston' was derived from his mother's maiden surname (Charlton) and his stepfather's surname (Heston),

Heston was always a reader and loved acting out roles from his favorite stories while wandering in the woods. This led to roles in school and amateur theater. Then World War II happened.

"In 1944, Heston enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces. He served for two years as a radio operator and aerial gunner aboard a B-25 Mitchell stationed in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands with the 77th Bombardment Squadron of the Eleventh Air Force. He reached the rank of Staff Sergeant. Heston married Northwestern University student Lydia Marie Clarke, who was six months his senior. That same year he joined the military. After his rise to fame, Heston narrated for highly classified military and Department of Energy instructional films, particularly relating to nuclear weapons, and "for six years Heston [held] the nation's highest security clearance" or Q clearance." The Q clearance is similar to a DoD or Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) clearance of Top Secret."

Pretty cool. Even that early, barely in his twenties, Heston was noted for his resonant and commanding voice. The Hestons moved to New York to pursue theater acting and started a playhouse. Film producer Hal B. Wallis of Casablanca spotted Heston in a 1950 television production of Wuthering Heights and offered him a contract. When Lydia reminded him they had decided to pursue theater and television, he replied, "Well, maybe just for one film to see what it's like." So is film history made. Heston was born to be filmed in Panavision. However, it should always be kept in mind that Heston was no movie snob. He kept doing roles for TV throughout his career.

Heston's breakthrough came when Cecil B. DeMille cast him as a circus manager in The Greatest Show on Earth, which was named by the Motion Picture Academy as the best picture of 1952. However, it could be said that Charlton's first role that made a major impact on movies as a whole would be his role as Harry Steele in 1954's Secret of the Incas. In it, Heston portrayed a roguish womanizer and antiquity thief. Hardboiled as hell. Sorta like the bastard son of Kirby O'Donnell. Paramount has never released the movie on DVD, despite it being a watchable movie. That could be because Lucas and Spielberg used it as a blueprint for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yeah, Heston is Indy's real dad, not Sean Connery.

Cecil B. DeMille tapped Charlton again in 1956, this time to play Moses in The Ten Commandments. Hugely successful, this is also the movie that has been said to have inspired Metallica to write "Creeping Death". Heston was on a roll from then on. He next appeared in two minor classics: Touch of Evil and The Big Country.

In 1959, Heston took on the titular role in Ben-Hur. The film was a cinematic tour de force, winning eleven Oscars—including one for Heston. He played leading roles in a number of fictional and historical epics: El Cid (1961), 55 Days at Peking (1963), as Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), and Charles 'Chinese' Gordon in Khartoum (1966). Heston was a pretty consistent actor, in my opinion, but this could be said to be his 'prime' period of film acting. Martin Scorsese is a huge fan of El Cid, as is yours truly. In one scene, Heston almost beats a man to death with a saddle. 'Nuff said.

With the 1960s drawing to a close, Heston, fittingly, starred in the first of what has been called his 'dystopian sci-fi trilogy'. Planet of the Apes came out in 1968, The Omega Man premiered in 1971 and Soylent Green hit the theaters in 1973. All are worthy, but I have to say that Planet of the Apes reigns supreme. I wasn't allowed to watch it the first time it aired on TV, but I managed to see it a couple of years later. In the early Seventies, the Planet of the Apes franchise was nearly equal in popularity among kids to what Star Wars was a few years later. I had a 'General Ursus' piggy bank, I'll put it that way.

Heston as George Taylor in *The Planet of the Apes*.

By that point, Heston was in his fifties and a little past his ‘heroic badass’ phase, which he’d maintained for three decades. He began taking more secondary roles…and was still cool as hell. For instance, in The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), Charlton plays Cardinal Richelieu, one of the great literary villains. Despite thespian youngbloods like Oliver Reed and Richard Chamberlain, Heston still dominates every scene he is in. You see the same thing in Midway, The Mountain Men or Tombstone. His stage presence and gravitas could not be denied.

Meanwhile, Heston was still doing TV. Often it was as ‘Charlton Heston’. He was that iconic, a living meme. Still, there were still films where he got to shine. He played Long John Silver in TNT’s Treasure Island. Charlton also put in a fine performance as the ‘Player King’ in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet.

That’s the thing: Richelieu, Long John Silver etc…Heston was unafraid to ‘play against type’. That is something that could rarely be said of Connery and basically never of John Wayne. While Heston was a truly admirable guy in real life—even some of his adversaries admitted that—he would play villains and losers if the role called for it. That, in my opinion, is where he truly outpaces Connery and Wayne. Gravitas works just as well for Richelieu as it does for Judah Ben-Hur.

Heston played so many notable characters from history and literature that it is kinda mind-boggling. Way more often than not, he played them well. Here is just a partial list:

Historical: Marc Antony, Andrew Jackson, ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody, Moses, El Cid, John the Baptist, Michelangelo, Sir Thomas More, Cardinal Richelieu, Thomas Jefferson, ‘Chinese’ Gordon and Henry VIII

Literary: Peer Gynt, Heathcliff, Macbeth, John Thornton (The Call of the Wild), The Player King, Sherlock Holmes and Long John Silver

Yes, I know some characters—like Richelieu—straddle the two categories.

Heston’s choice of roles reveals a lot. We know he was a reader. Again and again, he went for the adventurous and the epic, the truly classic. How often do you see De Niro or George Clooney going for such roles?

What did Heston read as a child and teenager? I would bet Shakespeare. Probably Jack London and maybe Edgar Rice Burroughs. The fact that he made so many movies with fantasy or SF elements—and horror; don’t forget his roles in The Omega Man and in The Mouth of Madness—points to him being that type of reader and actor. I need to read his autobiography. Whatever he might have read, Heston left us all with a legacy of films where swords were wielded in anger and adventure was just around the corner. George MacDonald Fraser, one of the great writers of swashbucklers, noted in his Hollywood History of the World that Heston was widely considered one of the truly ‘international’ actors working in Hollywood; someone who could pull off all kinds of roles set in any period.

Despite my best intentions, I've barely scratched the surface here. Heston's life spanned almost eighty-five years. His film and TV career stretched across six decades. Get out there and discover his work on resources like Youtube. You'll find something to like, I guarantee it.

Happy (belated) birthday, Charlton Heston. You made the world a better place by living in it