Charlton Heston
Charlton Heston was an American actor. He gained stardom for his leading man roles in numerous Hollywood films including biblical epics, science-fiction films, and action films. He won an Academy Award in addition to earning nominations for three Golden Globe Awards and three Primetime Emmy Awards. He won numerous honorary accolades including the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1978, the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1967, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1971, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1997, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003.
Heston gained stardom for his leading roles as Moses in The Ten Commandments and as the title role of Ben-Hur, the latter of which earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor. His other notable credits include The Greatest Show on Earth, Secret of the Incas, Touch of Evil, The Big Country, El Cid, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Khartoum, Planet of the Apes, Julius Caesar, The Omega Man, Antony and Cleopatra, Soylent Green, The Three Musketeers, Airport 1975, Earthquake, and Crossed Swords. He later acted in Mother Lode, Tombstone, True Lies, Alaska, and Hamlet.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, he was one of a handful of Hollywood actors who openly denounced racism and he was also an active supporter of the civil rights movement. In 1987, Heston left the Democratic Party and became a Republican, founding a conservative political action committee and supporting Ronald Reagan. Heston was a five-term president of the National Rifle Association, from 1998 to 2003. After announcing that he had Alzheimer's disease in 2002, he retired from acting and the NRA presidency.
Early life
Family
John Charles Carter was born on October 4, 1923, in Cook County, Illinois, to Lilla and Russell Whitford Carter, a sawmill operator. His autobiography states that he was born in Wilmette, Illinois, while most sources indicate that he was born in adjacent Evanston, Illinois. His birth certificate, registered when he was 11 days old, lists his name as Charlton Carter and records his birthplace as Evanston.Heston said in a 1995 interview that he was not very good at remembering addresses or his early childhood. Heston was partially of Scottish descent, including from the Clan Fraser, but the majority of his ancestry was English. His earliest colonial ancestors arrived in America from England in the 1600s. His maternal great-grandparents and namesakes were Englishman William Charlton from Sunderland and Scotswoman Mary Drysdale Charlton. They emigrated to Canada, where his grandmother, Marian Emily Charlton, was born in 1872. In his autobiography Heston refers to his father participating in his family's construction business. When Heston was an infant, his father's work moved the family to St. Helen, Michigan. It was a rural, heavily forested part of the state, and Heston lived an isolated yet idyllic existence, spending much time hunting and fishing in the backwoods of the area.
When Heston was ten years old, his parents divorced after having three children. Shortly thereafter, his mother remarried and Charlton, with his younger sister Lilla and younger brother Alan, next moved to Wilmette. Heston and his two siblings took the surname of his mother's new husband. The three children attended New Trier High School, which would become the high school attended by Rock Hudson and Ann-Margret. He recalled living there, "All kids play pretend games, but I did it more than most. Even when we moved to Chicago, I was more or less a loner. We lived in a North Shore suburb, where I was a skinny hick from the woods, and all the other kids seemed to be rich and know about girls". Contradictions on paper and in an interview surround when "Charlton" became Heston's first name. His birth certificate lists his name as Charlton Carter, and the 1930 United States census record for Richfield, Michigan, in Roscommon County, shows his name as being Charlton J. Carter at age six. Later accounts and movie studio biographies say he was born John Charles Carter. When Russell Carter died in 1966, Charlton's brother and sister changed their surname from Carter to Heston the following year; Charlton did not.
Charlton was his maternal grandmother Marian's maiden name, not his mother Lilla's. This is contrary to how 20th-century references read and what Heston said. When Heston's maternal grandmother and his biological maternal grandfather Charles Baines separated or divorced in the early 1900s, Marian Baines married William Henry Lawton in 1907. Charlton Heston's mother, Lilla, and her sister May were adopted by their maternal grandfather and changed their last name to Charlton in order to distance themselves from their biological father, Mr. Baines, who was an undesirable father figure. The Carters divorced in 1933 and Lilla Carter married Chester Heston. The newly married Mrs. Heston preferred her children use the same last name as hers. It was thus as Charlton Heston that he appeared in his first film with younger brother Alan Carter, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. His nickname was always Chuck.
Education
Heston frequently recounted that while growing up in northern Michigan in a sparsely populated area, he often wandered in the forest, "acting" out characters from books he had read. Later, in high school, he enrolled in New Trier's drama program, playing the lead role in the amateur silent 16 mm film adaptation of Peer Gynt, from the Ibsen play, by future film activist David Bradley released in 1941. From the Winnetka Community Theatre in which he was active, he earned a drama scholarship to Northwestern University. He attended college from 1941 to 1943 and among his acting teachers was Alvina Krause. Several years later, Heston teamed up with Bradley to produce the first sound version of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in which Heston played Mark Antony.World War II service
In March 1944 Heston married Northwestern University student Lydia Marie Clarke at Grace Methodist Church in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. That same year, he joined the military. Heston enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces and served for two years as a radio operator and aerial gunner aboard a North American B-25 Mitchell medium bomber stationed in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands with the 77th Bombardment Squadron of the Eleventh Air Force. He reached the rank of staff sergeant.After his rise to fame, Heston narrated for highly classified U.S. Armed Forces and Department of Energy instructional films, particularly relating to nuclear weapons, and "for six years Heston the nation's highest security clearance" or Q clearance. The Q clearance is similar to a DoD or DIA clearance of top secret.
Career
1947–1955: Early theatre and film roles
After the war, the Hestons lived in Hell's Kitchen, New York City, where they worked as artists' models. Seeking a way to make it in theatre, they decided to manage a playhouse in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1947, making $100 a week. In 1948, they returned to New York, where Heston was offered a supporting role in a Broadway revival of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, starring Katharine Cornell. In television, Heston played a number of roles in CBS's Studio One, one of the most popular anthology dramas of the 1950s. In 1949 Heston played Mark Antony in an independent film adaptation of Julius Caesar. Film producer Hal B. Wallis spotted Heston in a 1950 television production of Wuthering Heights and offered him a contract. When his wife reminded Heston they had decided to pursue theater and television, he replied, "Well, maybe just for one film to see what it's like."File:Heston-Jurado-Arrowhead.jpg|thumb|right|Heston with Katy Jurado in Arrowhead
Heston's first professional movie appearance was the leading role at age 26 in Dark City, a 1950 film noir produced by Hal Wallis. His 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. It was also the most popular movie of that year. King Vidor used Heston in a melodrama with Jennifer Jones, Ruby Gentry. He followed it with a Western at Paramount, The Savage, playing a white man raised by Indians. 20th Century Fox used him to play Andrew Jackson in The President's Lady opposite Susan Hayward. Back at Paramount he was Buffalo Bill in Pony Express. He followed this with another Western, Arrowhead.
In 1953, Heston was Billy Wilder's first choice to play Sefton in Stalag 17. However, the role was given to William Holden, who won an Oscar for it. Hal Wallis reunited Heston with Lizabeth Scott in a melodrama Bad for Each Other. In 1954, he made two adventure films for Paramount Pictures. The Naked Jungle had him battle a plague of killer ants. He played the lead in Secret of the Incas, which was shot on location at the archeological site Machu Picchu and has numerous similarities to Raiders of the Lost Ark, which appeared a quarter of a century later. Heston played William Clark, the explorer, in The Far Horizons alongside Fred MacMurray as Meriwether Lewis. He tried a comedy The Private War of Major Benson at Universal, then supported Jane Wyman in a drama Lucy Gallant.
File:Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments film trailer.jpg|thumb|left|Heston as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments
Heston became an icon for playing Moses in the hugely successful biblical epic The Ten Commandments, selected by director Cecil B. DeMille, who thought Heston bore an uncanny resemblance to Michelangelo's statue of Moses. DeMille cast Heston's three-month-old son, Fraser Clarke Heston, as the infant Moses. The Ten Commandments became one of the greatest box office successes of all time and is the eighth-highest-grossing film adjusted for inflation. His portrayal of the Hebrew prophet and deliverer was praised by film critics. The Hollywood Reporter described him as "splendid, handsome and princely in the scenes dealing with him as a young man, and majestic and terrible as his role demands it". The New York Daily News wrote that he "is remarkably effective as both the young, princely Moses and as the Patriarchal savior of his people". His performance as Moses earned him his first nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama and Spain's Fotogramas de Plata Award for Best Foreign Performer. When the Egyptian Theater reopened in December 1998, it screened Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 original The Ten Commandments, which had premiered there 75 years earlier. Charlton and Lydia Heston were honored guests at this opening showing and were seated with their longtime friends, brothers Charles Elias Disney and Daniel H. Disney.
File:Touch-of-Evil-1851-26.jpg|thumb|right|Orson Welles, Victor Millan, Joseph Calleia, and Heston in Touch of Evil
Heston went back to Westerns with Three Violent People. Universal tried to interest him in a thriller starring Orson Welles, Touch of Evil; Heston agreed to be in it if Welles directed. The film has come to be regarded as a classic masterpiece. He also played a rare supporting role in William Wyler's The Big Country opposite Gregory Peck and Burl Ives. Heston got another chance to play Andrew Jackson in The Buccaneer, produced by De Mille and starring Yul Brynner.