LOS ANGELES – Charlton Heston, who won the 1959 best actor Oscar as the chariot-racing “Ben-Hur” and portrayed Moses, Michelangelo, El Cid and other heroic figures in movie epics of the ’50s and ’60s, has died. He was 84… The actor died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills with his wife Lydia at his side, family spokesman Bill Powers said.
Awww. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. The obituaries are sure to pour in for this legendary actor. He won an Oscar for Ben Hur and has had a long and brilliant career, but to me he’ll always be Moses in The Ten Commandments.
Let the distasteful gun jokes begin in 3…2…1…
(I’m not saying we should make them but somebody’s going to…)
Oh, and I thought he’d already been dead for a while… Must have confused him with somebody. 🙂
Benji, you’re so like two hours late on that gun joke thing. I thought it was too soon, but within minutes people were mourning (and joking) on Twitter. What a world.
So I’ll say it. At least we can have his gun back now.
My favorite Heston role was as a Mexican cop, of all things, in Orson Welles’s great film noir flick Touch of Evil (1958).
Heston in “Touch of Evil” was one of the most hilarious cases of miscasting I have ever seen. Welles was magnificent, though. He was the epitome of corruption.
Heston couldn’t act. But he was, in his own way, a great movie star.
Loved him in Bowling for Columbine!
Heston was my Co Pilot… Yes.. Rabbi Heston (or JC Carter.. hmm.. his initials were J.C.C.) is a proxy for Jewish life in America. After WW2 he entered media and showed Jewish muscle in his roles in The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur. At a time when American Jews were coming of of the closet and fighting the quota system. Is it any wonder that the Six Day War was won after he appeared in these roles? And then he was in a Touch of Evil, playing against racial type. Just as the American Jew was trying to play other roles in American life. In the post VietNam War inflationary Watergate era, Heston played in Earthquake and other catastrophe films, just as Jes and Israel dealth with Black September, Munich and other tragedies. As for Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green, Heston, like the American Jew, was trying to tell the world that our actions make our future and that of course Am Yisrael Soylent Green.. We are all united as one.. and finally, what did he do? He became conservative (Likud wins, the lure of neo cons and American Jews), he played parodies of himself, and he once again played an uncredited ape role in the remake of Planet of the Apes (2001) (thus, the American Jews became hidden and uncredited again).. as for Alzheimers… well..
Chuck was a good guy.
Good thing that becoming a world-famous movie star doesn’t require that one can actually, well, act… Heston embodied a notion of rectitude (making him a perfect foil for Welles) in a way that seems quaintly out of place today. We don’t believe in Hestons anymore.
he was a classy dude:
http://www.mcsm.org/heston2.html
“On the other hand, I find my blood pressure rising when Clinton’s culturalshock troops participate in gay-rights fundraisers but boycott gun-rights fundraisers… and then claim it’s time to place homosexual men in tents with Boy Scouts, and suggest that sperm donor babies born into lesbian relationships are somehow better served and more loved.”
I just couldn’t see him as a Mexican, Tom. All I saw was Moses, El Cid and Ben Hur.
Yes, xisnotx, we know, we know. The man had Parkinsons. Nuff said. I chose to let him rest in peace and not bring up the unsavory parts of his later life. As a younger and healthier man, not only was he a larger than life actor, but he was also a great supporter of civil liberties, marching in rallies and all that. You coulda brought that up too.
ck – how is that quote “unsavory’ – as compared with, say, letting pederasts into the Boy Scouts?
Well, at least now someone will be able to pry the gun from his cold hand…