THE ROVER Charlton Heston Dead |
4-6-2008 2:22 PM |
| RIP |
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Philosophical Charlton Heston who has died aged 84 |
4-6-2008 2:34 PM |
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/features/display.var.2175324.0.Charlton_Heston.php
Charlton Heston
Born October 4, 1923;
Died April 5, 2008.
Charlton Heston, who has died aged 84, starred in a series of big, epic movies in which he delivered big, epic performances. He won an Oscar for Ben-Hur (1959), played Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956), took the title role in El Cid (1961) and was John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). "I have a face that belongs in another century," he once said.
Latterly, many people felt it was not just his face and acting that were suited to another century, but also his politics. He was a right-winger, most famous for his advocacy of the right to carry guns.
It is easy to ridicule his acting. On screen he did seem wooden, but that is not necessarily an insult. It was simply that he looked like he had been carved from oak and he cut through cinematic history like the figurehead of a ship riding over the waves
A towering figure, with a rich, deep voice, he brought presence and authority to every role. He even played God in the Paul Hogan comedy Almost an Angel (1990). Biblical epics have fallen out of fashion, but some of his other films are now established as timeless classics.
He was the least likely Mexican ever, blacked up and wearing a ridiculous moustache, in the Orson Welles film noir Touch of Evil (1958). But it currently ranks No 89 in the Internet Movie Database list of the best films of all time, voted for by the public.
He was highly effective in futuristic movies. With that jutting chin, he looked like Dan Dare. But it was not as some sort of space-age superman, but as humanity's representative, that he worked so well in Planet of the Apes (1968) and The Omega Man (1971), which was recently remade with Will Smith as I Am Legend.
In those sci-fi movies, he was tough, stoic and self-reliant, but he also embodied human decency, a decency suitably outraged at the final shock revelations in both Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green (1973). Heston himself started out as a liberal and campaigned for Martin Luther King.
On screen, he may have seemed rather humourless, but he gloriously lampooned himself with a cameo in Wayne's World 2 (1993).
In a classic post-modernist moment, Wayne (Mike Myers) complains about the acting of the man giving him directions at a petrol station. The man is replaced by Heston, who delivers directions and manages to work in a reference to his lost love, in a totally overblown performance that reduces Wayne to tears.
Rants about guns made Heston unpopular with many, though the documentary-maker Michael Moore succeeded in the difficult task of making viewers sympathise with Heston when he interviewed him for Bowling for Columbine (2002), with Moore playing the role of a heartless bully and Heston as host, victim and frail old man.
Heston was born in Evanston, Illinois, though there is doubt over the year, and even his name. It was probably 1923, though some sources suggest 1924. His surname was originally Carter. His first name may have been John. Charlton was his mother's maiden name. His parents divorced and she married a man called Heston.
He had a grandmother called Catherine Fraser, from Beauly, near Inverness, and was passionate about his Scottish roots, regularly wore the kilt and celebrated Burns Night.
During his formative years in rural Michigan, Heston hunted game in the woods, rode through the snow on a dog-sled and lived the life of a young frontiersman. The experiences are not insignificant in a man who would later epitomise white American manhood.
He went to university on a drama scholarship, served in the US Army air force, and then pursued an acting career in New York City.
Over the years I had considerable dealings with Heston and his "people". I met and interviewed him in Glasgow in 1990 when he was promoting a new version of Treasure Island, in which he got to chew scenery as Long John Silver and a young Christian Bale was Jim Hawkins. It was directed by his son, Fraser Heston.
I later wrote a book about Planet of the Apes. This was at a time when Heston was getting very bad press and the promised interview never happened. I interviewed virtually every other major surviving figure from the series, including Ted Post, who directed Heston in the sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970).
Post first met Heston as a struggling actor in the 1940s. The director amusingly recalled going to see another actor in an apartment in a rundown part of New York only to find Heston answering the door in his underwear.
Despite the circumstances, Heston left Post in no doubt that he believed he was destined to become a great actor.
The director took an instant dislike to the undressed "egoist". It was more than 20 years before they met again. Post reckoned Heston remembered the first meeting, but neither ever mentioned it.
Heston made his Broadway debut as Proculeius in Antony and Cleopatra in 1947 and his film debut as Antony in Julius Caesar in 1950, establishing his presence in the showbiz version of the ancient world.
He rounded off the 1950s with Ben-Hur, winning an Oscar as the Jewish prince who is betrayed by a Roman (Stephen Boyd), becomes a galley slave and ends up facing his former friend in the film's legendary chariot race.
Heston was not universally popular, but he personally championed Touch of Evil and got it made at a time when Orson Welles's star had dimmed.
He never became a great actor, but he did become a Hollywood legend. His best films were well behind him when he came to Glasgow for Treasure Island, but the crowd loved him still.
One boy, whose parents must have been children when Ben-Hur came out, asked why so many people were gathered outside the Cannon Film Centre in Sauchiehall Street. "It's Charlton Heston," he was told. "No way," said the boy, disbelievingly. It was as if he had been told Moses or God were visiting.
Heston represented a Hollywood that now seems as much a part of history as Ben-Hur and El Cid.
The final shot of Heston in Bowling for Columbine is of an old man, trying to escape across the courtyard from his self-righteous interrogator. That shot says as much about Heston as anything in Ben-Hur. He was a legend but, above all, Heston was human, with all the flaws that term implies.
He is survived by Lydia, his wife of 64 years, two children and three grandchildren.
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THE ROVER Fear Not |
4-6-2008 4:34 PM |
"Was it because there were no graves in Egypt, that you took us away to Die in the Wilderness ? ? ? "
"Fear Not ! ! ! Stand Still and See the Salvation of the Lord ! ! ! "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmEs0BhCNpA |
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BABS A man who truly stuck by his words |
4-7-2008 11:16 AM |
| A man who truly stuck by his words. |
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TACO RIP |
4-7-2008 11:47 AM |
| http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0B_UZNtEk4 |
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KPE6z Hollywoods legendary actors |
4-7-2008 1:47 PM |
Charlton Heston was absolutely one of Hollywoods legendary actors. He came from a completely different time and Hollywood was entirely different then. Whether or not everyone has the same opinion about him as a person or an actor is beside the point. My condolences to his family and friends.
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HOCKEY NUT From my cold dead hands |
4-7-2008 2:56 PM |
| From my cold dead hands |
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MIDNIGHT STAR 8 im really upset too hear this |
4-7-2008 3:58 PM |
| im really upset too hear this. such a fine and iconic actor. R.I.P. |
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Valhalla He was the hawk |
4-7-2008 4:17 PM |
Charlton Heston: Ultimate Movie Star
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 6, 2008; 4:00 PM
He was the hawk.
He soared. In fact, everything about him soared. His shoulders soared, his cheekbones soared, his brows soared. Even his hair soared.
And for a good two decades, Charlton Heston, who died Saturday at 83, was the ultimate American movie star. In a time when method actors and ethnic faces were gradually taking over, Heston remained the last of the ramrod straight, flinty, squinty, tough-as-old-hickory movie guys.
He and his producers and directors understood his appeal, and used it for maximum effect on the big technicolor screen. Rarely a doubter, never a coward, inconceivable as a shirker, he played men of granite virtue no matter the epoch. He played commanders, Biblical prophets, Jewish heroes, tough-as-nails cowpokes, calm aviators, last survivors, quarterbacks and a president or two.
Later in his life, he took that stance into politics, becoming president of the National Rifle Association just when anti-gun attitudes were reaching their peak. Pilloried and parodied, lampooned and bullied, he never relented, he never backed down, and in time it came to seem less an old star's trick of vanity than an act of political heroism. He endured, like Moses. He aged, like Moses. And the stone tablet he carried only had one commandment: Thou shalt be armed. It can even be said that if the Supreme Court in June finds a meaning in the Second Amendment consistent with NRA policy, that he will have died just short of the Promised Land -- like Moses.
Was he great actor? Many think not, and few would rank him with contemporaries like Brando, Dean, even Widmark or Wayne. But at the same time his talent was much underrated, as it frequently is for people who enjoy the blessed gift of great beauty. For the purposes of the movie industry in the '50s, at the height of its patriotism and Western-centrism, he was a perfect fit and always gave solid, professional work. Can anyone imagine either "The Ten Commandments" or "Ben-Hur" without him?
And he was in a number of first-rate and even a few great movies. His greatest film, "Touch of Evil," featured Heston as a Mexican narcotics detective, probably his biggest stretch and not really an outstanding performance. But he was invaluable in getting Universal to put up the money for Orson Welles' s great shaggy dog. It greatness may be incidental to Heston's performance, but its existence certainly isn't incidental to his behind-the-scenes efforts.
Then there's "The Ten Commandments," such a perennial that even today, half a century after its creation, it gets a ritual primetime network unspooling. Nobody ever accused its director, Cecile B. DeMille of greatness; DeMille was more entrepreneur, logistics expert, visionary, and carny barker than true artist. And the movie he made remains a monument to kitsch, particularly the orgy sequence unleashed by Edward G. Robinson. (Now, would you go to an orgy hosted by Edward G. Robinson?) And DeMille's concept of Moses wasn't particularly deep either: he saw the great conduit between man and God as a kind of Mount Rushmore head, given life atop Heston's lanky frame and posed heroically against dramatic skies. The best performance in the picture was by Heston's hair, which grew into a lion's gray mane with Susan Sontag highlights (boy, was that scary!) But he functioned there as he did in "Ben-Hur" essentially as the rock upon which the church of giant '50s pop religiosio-amen-chorus moviemaking was built. He may not have really parted the Red Sea but he got millions to part with their bucks to the greater glory of the big studios and that was sermonizing Hollywood could understand.
It's easy to make fun of these two behemoths. Of the two, "Ben-Hur" is vastly the superior and again it's Heston's natural instincts for the heroic, as opposed to the pompous or the self-dramatizing, that help the movie to work so well. He mastered horse-team driving, no easy thing, for the still-classic chariot race, many people's choice for the best action sequence in movie history. He looked great in a toga, Roman armor and a Jewish robe, he was able to convey Judah Ben-Hur's suffering, anguish and heroism without overstating it, or fighting the scenery or giving the film an unsavory narcissistic center. In the end the movie stands for a certain kind of glory and grandeur that have passed from the scene and the screen, except in occasional nostalgic retro-wallows like "Gladiator."
Heston made a number of other extremely good films as well. His favorite was 1968's "Will Penny," a hardscrabble western with director Tom Gries, set in an anti-romantic west of hungry, starving people, inarticulate heroes who never saw the inside of a bathtub. I know it was his favorite film because he sent me a copy after we met at an NRA event many years later. And it was a great performance in a very good film, and it showed what he could do: Who could believe the same man could make you enter the private lives of Michaelangelo and Will Penny, genius with chisel and brush, good hand with frying pan, lariat and Winchester.
In fact, his later films let him be more actor and less icon. He was always pursuasive, except in the football movie, "Number One," where slow motion revealed that he lacked a professional athlete's grace and power; he was only big. But in "The Omega Man," "Soylent Green" and "The Last Hard Men," all humble B movies, he was extremely impressive (in "Soylent" he played a great scene with orgy-master Edward G. Robinson, another woefully underappreciated actor).
But his last great film was probably Sam Peckinpah's "Major Dundee," playing the title role as a Union officer in the Southwest who, short of men, recruits some Confederate cavalrymen (led by Richard Harris) to cross into Mexico in search of an Apache band raiding the frontier. It's got Peckinpah's native grit, insight into male violence, and sense of scrubby western reality, and Senta Berger in a completely ludicrous role as a European doctor (!) in a tiny Mexican village (Hollywood! Don't you love it?). But the real issue is Harris vs. Heston. Harris, desperate for attention, turns into a magnificently neurotic, self-dramatizing, deathwish-driven troubadour of Nineteenth Century "honor," while Heston is stuck in the thankless role as the practical military guy with a hard problem to solve. In other words, Harris is Doc Holiday, poor Chuck the dreary Wyatt Earp. Interpretations will vary, possibly driven by political considerations, and maybe I'm in the bag for the big guy, but I give it to Chuck on points in the late rounds.
One of his earliest films was a noir entitled "Dark City," but his face and frame were entirely too free of neurosis for the world of film noir. In almost no time, he moved to center ring roles -- "The Greatest Show on Earth," as a circus boss in 1952, for DeMille. By 1953 , he was Buffalo Bill Cody in "Pony Express," his first iconic role. It just seemed to get better and better and certainly by the time of "The Ten Commandments" he had arrived. That role also cemented him in place as Mr. Monument to the Great Western Way.
If you pine for some hint of scandal or even minor weakness, Heston's life isn't the place to look. He married early (to Lydia Clarke) stayed married, had kids and seemed never to make the gossips.
In his private life, he was given to follow that strange calling that is half public service and half self-aggrandizement with the distinction frequently blurred. He was six-term president of the Screen Actors Guild, an early celebrity marcher in the civil rights crusade, and his beloved status in Tinsel Town was certainly validated when he received the Academy Awards' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1977.
Why then, it must be asked, did he take the leadership of the NRA, never the most popular of lobbying outfits in Washington? One cynical explanation is that the old star was looking for an audience that would treat him as he had been treated in the late '50s and early '60s, almost as a god.
But the abuse he took! The anger he generated. The fury he absorbed from a Hollywood and a critical community that were turning ever more liberal in the wake of the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. Good Lord, he didn't need that at all.
The only answer can be: he believed. His had to have been a ramrod sense of the Second Amendment and he never varied from it. Hate his politics or love them, you have to say: There was a man.
When I met him at that NRA event (I am a member; he had read some of my novels), I was disappointed. He was -- no other word will do -- old. He had an old man's stooped posture and an extremely tentative way of speaking, as if clarity were an issue. His features, once so mythic, now seemed fragile, draped with a loose parchment of delicate, spotted skin. He didn't walk so much as shuffle, as if he were already wearing those hospital paper shoes; it was as if he had a walker with an oxygen tank attached.
We exchanged cordialities and banalities (can't remember a word of it), and then it was time for him to address the crowd. He shuffled slowly into the big room, and the spotlight came on him, and it was as if with each step he tossed off a decade. His shuffle became a stride and then almost a strut. His posture went from the question mark of age to the exclamation point of youth. His lungs filled, revealing the full breadth of his wide shoulders. He neck turned iron, his chin came aloft, his vision sharpened and the years just fell away like leaves. When he spoke he boomed in Moses' triumphant baritones, delivering the Tablets to the believers.
I thought: Good for Chuck. Magnificent to the end. |
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Amel Rest in Peace |
4-7-2008 7:41 PM |
He was a great Actor and Human Being. He stood up for the things He believed right or wrong.
Thats all you can ask a Good Man to do.
.Rest in Peace . |
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Juliet RIP Charlton Heston |
4-7-2008 7:47 PM |
| RIP Charlton Heston |
Stray Cat Guess we can take that gun now |
4-7-2008 8:04 PM |
| Guess we can take that gun now, Charlton |
gg....Montreal Imagine if |
4-8-2008 10:48 AM |
Imagine if at the end of Planet of the Apes you saw
the Eiffel Tower and not the Statue of Liberty.
People would have said, "Oh my god! They were in
France all this time!"
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