Charlton Heston, the winner of the 1959 best actor Oscar as chariot-racing Ben-Hur, died Saturday night at his Beverly Hills, California home.
According to the Internet Movie Database, Heston was born on October 4, 1924, making him 83. However, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday that he was 84.
Heston, who starred as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 Biblical extravaganza The Ten Commandments, died with his wife Lydia at his side, spokesman Bill Powers said.
Frequently portraying heroic figures in 1950s and 1960s movie epics, he reprised his Academy Award-winning role in the 2002 Goodtime Entertainment animated video Ben-Hur, voicing the narrator as well.
With a booming baritone voice, he narrated several animated productions, such as the 1997 Disney feature film Hercules.
And belying his arch-conservative image, he narrated the English dub of the 1967 Soviet-American animated feature film Maugli, variously known in English as The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling's the Jungle Book and Adventures of Mowgli.
His first animation project was as narrator of Burt Strattford Productions' 1992 half-hour special Noel, which aired on NBC. He guested as himself in Dam, a 1997 episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
Using archived audio footage, Heston was caricatured in Robert Smigel's 1999 Fun With Real Audio episode Gun Control, speaking against gun control in the Senate.
In live action, he portrayed Michelangelo and El Cid.
In 2002, Heston disclosed that he had symptoms consistent with Alzheimer's disease: "I must reconcile courage and surrender in equal measure."
The muscular Heston often said: "I have a face that belongs in another century." In a 1965 interview, he reflected: "I don't seem to fit really into the 20th century. Pretty soon, though, I've got to get a part where I wear pants with pleats and pockets."
"He was the screen hero of the 1950s and 1960s, a proven stayer in epics, and a pleasing combination of piercing blue eyes and tanned beefcake," David Thomson wrote in his book The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.
Heston worked with a wide array of famous directors: DeMille in The Greatest Show on Earth and The Ten Commandments, Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, Sam Peckinpah in Major Dundee, William Wyler in The Big Country and Ben-Hur, George Stevens in The Greatest Story Ever Told, Franklin Schaffner in The War Lord and Planet of the Apes, and Anthony Mann in El Cid.
Born John Charles Carter in Evanston, Illinois, Heston became a best-selling author. He also became a controversial gun advocate, becoming president of the National Rifle Association in 1998 and serving until 2003.
Infuriating gun control supporters, Heston imitated Moses' parting of the Red Sea. Instead raising a rod over his head, he lifted a flintlock and dared his enemies to pry it "from my cold, dead hands."
Heston's Oscar-winning role in Ben-Hur had him racing four white horses at top speed in a 15-minute chariot race in which his character, a noble, heroic Jew, competes against his childhood Roman friend, played by Stephen Boyd.
His landmark scenes in movies included his cat-and-mouse game with Welles in the oil fields in Touch of Evil, his discovery that "Soylent Green is people!", the dead Spanish hero on his horse in El Cid, and tortured discovery, at the end of 1968's Planet of the Apes, of a half-buried Statue of Liberty.
"All this wouldn't be so forceful or so funny if it weren't for the use of Charlton Heston in the role," New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael wrote about Planet of the Apes. "With his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body, Heston is a godlike hero; built for strength, he is an archetype of what makes Americans win. He represents American power -- and he has the profile of an eagle."
Heston liked to say that he had performed Shakespeare on film more than any other actor. Once, he complained that modern movie stars don't try to improve their acting skills by trying Shakespeare.
He was a prominent civil rights activist in the 1950s. President of the Screen Actors Guild for six terms, he received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian award.
In August 2002, Heston made a dramatic videotaped address announcing his illness. A days later, he sat down in his Coldwater Canyon home and reflected on his uncertain future.
"The world is a tough place," he said with a chuckle. "You're never going to get out of it alive."
Charlton Heston married Lydia Marie Clarke in July 1944. They had two children: Fraser Clarke Heston, a TV producer-director, and Holly Heston Rochell. Billed as Fraser Heston, their son appeared in The Ten Commandments as the infant Moses. He is also survived by two grandchildren.
A private memorial service is planned. However, no further details were provided.
Bandai Visual's Freedom certainly lives up to its name, resolutely refusing to settle down in one place for very long. What started off as a grand conspiracy theory sci-fi story set on the Moon turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland buddy flick by volumes 4 and 5 of the series. With volume 6, Freedom returns to the stars in a story where an Earth population with barely any technology sets out to launch two teenagers to the Moon in a rocket. The resulting tale mostly drops the "fiction" and aims more for straight "science," with a few concessions to dramatic tension and time constraints.The latest volume of Freedom picks up nearly two years after the last one. While Biz has settled into an uneasy comfort with life on Earth, Takeru still remains restless. After expending so much effort to get there from the moon, he now seeks to return to the lunar city of Eden to spread the truth about Earth. He gains an ally in Ao, the girl whose photo sent him on his quixotic quest in the first place. In a parallel story to his, we learn that her father was part of an earlier failed effort to reach the moon, and that she seeks to follow in his footsteps despite the disapproval of those close to her. Determination and elbow grease leads to a rocket cobbled together from the remains of the Air and Space Museum, leading up to the tense and thrilling moment of truth as the launch clock ticks down.If there is a complaint about this installment of Freedom, it is that the flashbacks to Ao's father's rocket launch of the past are not quite distinct enough from events of the show's present. There isn't an easily discernible cue that a flashback sequence has started, meaning that there were several moments of confusion and rewinding required to puzzle out the timeline of the story being told. At one point, a young girl with Ao's trademark pigtails made me wonder if the story had jumped forward a decade or so to show Ao and Takeru's daughter before I realized that it was a flashback with a younger
Ao. However, these hiccups are minor and go away fairly quickly, and it must be said that the parallel attempts to get to the moon make for fascinating viewing. Of course, there is a last-minute emergency in Takeru and Ao's launch, and a suicidally brave act of self-sacrifice to try and resolve the emergency, but it's easy to forgive the slightly overused plot twists because they're done quite well.It may beggar belief that such a society would be able to prepare a lunar rocket for launch in what seems to be a matter of weeks, but Freedom manages to sidestep this problem with copious amounts of "let's put on a show!" enthusiasm and passion. Americans have become incredibly jaded about space and space travel of late. Perhaps the years of spacefaring science fiction have blinded us to the beauties and challenges of the real thing. Perhaps the entrenched bureaucracy and several high-profile failures of NASA have soured our taste for exploring the final frontier. Perhaps we just have other, far more immediate terrestrial problems on our minds. This last volume of Freedom manages to be a delightful antidote to such thoughts, communicating the awe and power of manned space flight and reminding us once again what an incredible achievement it is to get to space at all. Their passion and amazement turns out to be quite contagious.As with earlier volumes, Freedom volume 6 is a beautifully produced but very short DVD, running less than 30 minutes end-to-end. It continues to use the DVD/HD-DVD hybrid format, even though HD-DVD has now officially bee
n euthanized in the market, and all the special features of the movie are on the HD-DVD layer of the disc. As with all the other volumes, the visual presentation is incredibly beautiful even on the standard-definition DVD, and Bandai Visual provides an excellent and readable set of subtitles to go along with the Japanese language soundtrack.With just one more volume to go, it is hard to see how Freedom will manage to tie off its many loose plot elements in time. However, this is perhaps the best compliment one can give to the series, since it is easy to find yourself rooting for the characters and hoping that they'll get a decent sense of closure. Freedom sure has been a fun ride, even if (or maybe because) you have no idea where you're going.
