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Charlton Heston – a movie legend died 83

 

Celebrity Deaths  Charlton Heston Hollywood
Buy from Amazon.com: Charlton Heston movies, DVDs, & Memorabilia

Charlton hestonCharlton Heston (October 4, 1924 – April 5, 2008) was an Academy Award-winning American film actor. In a long career, Heston was known for playing heroic roles, such as Harry Steele in Secret of the Incas , Moses in The Ten Commandments, Colonel George Taylor in Planet of the Apes and Judah Ben-Hur in Ben-Hur. Early in his career, he was one of a handful of Hollywood stars to publicly speak out against racism and was active in the civil rights movement. During the latter part of his movie career, he starred in films such as The Omega Man and Soylent Green that had a strong environmental message. He was president of the National Rifle Association from 1998 to 2003.

Death of Charlton Heston
Heston died on April 5, 2008 at his home in Beverly Hills, California with his wife by his side. Charlton Heston was 84 years old at the time of his death. He had Alzheimer’s disease since 2002 but the cause of death is not known.

Charlton Hester – Ben-Hur (1959) Trailer

Celebrity Deaths  Charlton Heston Hollywood
Buy from Amazon.com: Charlton Heston movies, DVDs, & Memorabilia  

Charlton Heston’s Filmography

Peer Gynt (1941) (student film)
Dark City (1950)
Introducing Charlton Heston (1950)
Julius Caesar (1950 film) (1950)
Ruby Gentry (1952)
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
The Savage (1952)
Arrowhead (1953)
Bad for Each Other (1953)
Pony Express (1953)
The President’s Lady (1953)
Three Lives (1953)
Secret of the Incas (1954)
The Naked Jungle (1954)
Lucy Gallant (1955)
The Far Horizons (1955)
The Private War of Major Benson (1955)
The Ten Commandments (1956)
Three Violent People (1957)
The Big Country (1958)
The Buccaneer (1958)
Touch of Evil (1958)
Ben-Hur (1959)
The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959)
El Cid (1961)
The Fugitive Eye (1961) (hosted by Fred Astaire)[19]
The Pigeon That Took Rome (1962)
55 Days at Peking (1963)
Diamond Head (1963)
The Five Cities of June (1963)
Major Dundee (1965)
The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965)
The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)
The War Lord (1965)
The Egyptologists (1965)
Khartoum (1966)
Think Twentieth (1967)
Maugli (1967) (narrator in English version)
All About People (1967)
The American Film: 1966 White House Festival of the Arts (1967)
 While I Run This Race (1967)
Counterpoint (1968)
Planet of the Apes (1968)
Rowan & Martin at the Movies (1968)
Will Penny (1968)
The Movie Experience: A Matter of Choice (1968)
Number One (1969)
The Heart of Variety (1969)
Rod Laver’s Wimbledon (1969)
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)
Julius Caesar (1970)
The Hawaiians (1970)
The Festival Game (1970)
King: A Filmed Record… Montgomery to Memphis (1970)
The Last Man Alive (1971)
The Omega Man (1971)
Antony and Cleopatra (1972)
Skyjacked (1972)
The Call of the Wild (1972)
Our Active Earth (1972)
A Look at the World of Soylent Green (1973)
Soylent Green (1973)
The Three Musketeers (1973)
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1973)
Airport 1975 (1974)
Earthquake (1974)
The Four Musketeers (1974)
The Fun of Your Life (1975)
Midway (1976)
The Last Hard Men (1976)
They Were There (1976)
Two-Minute Warning (1976)
America at the Movies (1976)
Crossed Swords (1977)
Gray Lady Down (1978)
The Awakening (1980)
 The Mountain Men (1980)[20]
Mother Lode (1982)
Chiefs (1983) (mini-series)
The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal (1985)
Directed by William Wyler (1986)
Proud Men (1987)
Call from Space (1989) (voice)
Almost an Angel (1990)
Solar Crisis (1990)
Treasure Island (1990)
Genghis Khan (1992) (unfinished)
A Thousand Heroes (1992) (TV)
Tombstone (1993)
Wayne’s World 2 (1993)
SeaQuest DSV (1993) (TV)
True Lies (1994)
A Century of Cinema (1994)
In the Mouth of Madness (1995)
Friends (1995) (Guest as Himself)
The Avenging Angel (1995) (TV)
Alaska (1996)
Hamlet (1996) (1 Player)
Ben Johnson: Third Cowboy on the Right (1996)
The Dark Mist (1996)
Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s (1997)
Alaska: Spirit of the Wild (1997)
Hercules (1997)
Armageddon (1998)
Any Given Sunday (1999)
Gideon (1999)
Planet of the Apes (2001)
The Order (2001)
Town & Country (2001)
Last Party 2000 (2001)
Cats & Dogs (2001) (voice)
My Father, Rua Alguem 5555 (2003) 

Biography

Early life
Heston was born John Charles Carter in Evanston, Illinois, the son of Lilla (née Charlton) and Russell Whitford Carter, a mill operator.[3] When he was ten, his parents divorced. Shortly thereafter, his mother married Chester Heston. The new family moved to well-off Wilmette, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago. Heston (his new surname) attended New Trier High School.

He enrolled in the school’s drama program, where he performed with such outstanding results that he earned a drama scholarship to Northwestern University from the Winnetka Community Theatre in which he was also active. While still in high school, he played in the silent 16 mm amateur film adaptation of Peer Gynt made by David Bradley. Several years later the same team produced the first sound version of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which Heston played Mark Antony.

In 1944, Heston left college and enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces. He served for two years as a B-25 radio operator/gunner stationed in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands with the Eleventh Air Force, rising to the rank of Staff Sergeant.

While in the service, he married fellow Northwestern student Lydia Marie Clarke in 1944. After the war, the two lived in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, where they worked as models. They have a son, Fraser Clarke Heston and an adopted daughter, Holly Ann Heston.

Seeking a way to make it in theater, Charlton and Lydia Heston decided in 1947 to manage a playhouse in Asheville, North Carolina. In 1948, they went back to New York where Heston was offered a supporting role in a Broadway revival of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, starring Katharine Cornell. He also had success in television, playing a number of roles in CBS’s Studio One, one of the most popular anthology dramas of the 1950s.

Acting career
Heston’s most frequently played roles on stage include the title role in Macbeth, Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons, and Mark Antony in both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. He also cited Mister Roberts as one of his favorite roles, and tried unsuccessfully to revive the show in the early ’90s.

He was unable to use his birth name, John Carter, as an actor because it bore too close a resemblance to the name of the hero in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first novel A Princess of Mars, which was in development at the time although the production fell through. In 1950, he earned recognition for his appearance in his first professional movie, Dark City. His breakthrough came in 1952 with his role of a circus manager in The Greatest Show on Earth. Heston was Billy Wilder’s first choice to play JJ Sefton in Stalag 17 (1953). The role was eventually given to Oscar winner William Holden. But the muscular, 6 ft 3 in, square jawed Heston became an icon by portraying Moses in The Ten Commandments, a part he was chosen for reportedly because director Cecil B. DeMille thought that he bore an uncanny resemblance to the statue of Moses by Michelangelo.

He played leading roles in a number of fictional and historical epics—such as Ben-Hur, El Cid, 55 Days at Peking, The Agony and the Ecstasy (as Michelangelo himself), and Khartoum—during his long career. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his 1959 performance in the title role of Ben-Hur, one of 11 earned by that film. Heston accepted the role in Ben-Hur after Burt Lancaster, another similarly tall, muscular, square jawed, blonde, blue eyed actor, turned it down. Many years later, Lancaster charged that if Heston became typecast in heroic roles it was his own fault, because "he accepted the limitation." And although Lancaster later took on the role of Moses in a TV version of Moses’ life, it was Heston who would be identified with the Biblical epic more than any other actor, voicing the role of Judah Ben-Hur for a cartoon version of the Lew Wallace novel as late as 2003.

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