Charlton Heston

Charlton Heston ( October 4th, 1923 - April 5th, 2008)
a.k.a. Charles Carter

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Parts the Sea Long Enough to Talk About His Epic Career
Charlton Heston liked big roles -- on the screen and off. When we spoke with him in March 2001, he was 76, and he remained a paradigm of square-jawed confidence, instantly recognizable as the man who evoked so many legendary figures -- Moses in The Ten Commandments; St. John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told; Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy; Judah Ben-Hur in Ben-Hur. Off camera, his presence has been felt too -- and we're not talking about his narration work on Disney's Hercules and The Jungle Book: The Adventures of Mowgli. No, Heston has stayed in the public eye championing Republican politics, presiding over the Screen Actors Guild for six terms and serving as the president of the National Rifle Association. With many of Heston's classic films coming into sharp focus, thanks to DVD releases, we gave the epic actor a call. And suddenly the voice that snarled "Get your stinking hands off of me, you damned dirty ape" in Planet of the Apes, and croaked "Soylent Green is people" in Soylent Green was on the phone - fresh from watching his nine-year-old grandson's tennis lesson on the court at his Los Angeles home.

Barnes & Noble.com: How did the lesson go?

Charlton Heston: He's getting better. When you start them young, maybe they can actually learn the game.

B&N.com: Start too late, like I did, and you're sunk.

CH: Me too.

B&N.com: Is it still a passion for you?

CH: Well I don't play a great deal any more, and I never did with the passion my grandson has, but that's good.

B&N.com: Well you had other things to do.

CH: Oh yes. But he's into hunting, too, and all that stuff.

B&N.com: Great. Let's talk about some of your big-screen epics coming on to DVD. You must be excited that people are going to see such films as The Greatest Story Ever Told and Ben-Hur with all the crispness of their wide-screen theatrical presentations?

CH: Yes, that I'm told. That's very rewarding.

B&N.com: Our staff watched the chariot race during our weekly meeting last Thursday.

CH: That's quite a sequence. That'll hold your attention.

B&N.com: Right, we didn't get anything accomplished...

CH: Of course not.

B&N.com: But the point is that to people who've seen Ben-Hur only in pan-and-scan versions, or old copies made from lackluster prints, the chariot race is a revelation.

CH: I think one of the differences between Ben-Hur and, may I say, another very good film -- Gladiator -- is that the latter was not live-action, in a sense.

B&N.com: And that makes a huge difference.

CH: Contemporary films like Gladiator achieve so much by having the actors perform in front of a blue screen and then filling in the action around them digitally. As I've been saying for 40 years, when the time comes that they can duplicate the actors, then we're all out of business.

B&N.com: You and Stephen Boyd did so much of your own stunt work for the movie. That would be much easier today, right?

CH: Well, we both learned to drive the chariot. Indeed, Stephen deserves credit because he came on board relatively late. I had been learning to drive the chariot for the better part of a month before Stephen joined the cast and came down from Britain. But he really dug into it and he did a wonderful job. Of course, the author of the chariot race is [second-unit director] Yakima Canutt. He directed it. William Wyler told him to direct it. And he had full control over it.

I remember when I was still practicing to drive the chariot, which was no easy thing to learn, we were sitting one day, resting the horses. Actually we were resting me, not the horses. Well I said, "You know Yak, I can drive this sucker now, I really can. And I can't thank you enough for that. There's just one thing that worries me: For the past three weeks, it's just been me, you, and one of the three white teams out here all alone in this huge arena. In another ten days we're going to start shooting this sequence and I'm not so sure I can handle that." Yak pushed his cap back and said, "Chuck, you just make sure you stay in the chariot, I guarantee you're gonna win the damn race." [laughs]

B&N.com: Those were great days for you. When you look back on the decade beginning 1956 -- when you starred in The Ten Commandments and, in succession, such landmarks as Touch of Evil, Ben-Hur, The Agony and the Ecstasy, and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) -- is it all like a blur now?

CH: No, it was certainly an exciting time and I remember it vividly. I feel very fortunate to work in those films and for directors such as William Wyler, who in my opinion was the best director of actors in the history of motion pictures. At least in my time.

B&N.com: You also worked with Orson Welles on Touch of Evil; Cecil B. DeMille on both The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Show on Earth; and George Stevens on The Greatest Story Ever Told.

CH: Yes. By far the triumph in that film, though, was Max Von Sydow. Max was far and away the best Jesus I ever saw. Not having seen the real one, yet. Max is the best European actor there is. He works all he wants to. He's a wonderful actor who can do just about anything; and a lovely gentleman.

B&N.com: He also played Satan in Needful Things, directed by your son, Fraser Clarke Heston.

CH: Yes. There's a funny story about that. There was an Irish actor in the film, William Morgan Sheppard, who was aware that my son had played the baby Moses in The Ten Commandments. I was visiting the set one evening, and Morgan and I got to talking. He said: "You know you don't see that every day," and pointed to Fraser going over something with Max. "What's that?" I asked. And he said, "It isn't every day that you see Moses telling Jesus how to play the Devil." [laughs]

B&N.com: You married Lydia Clarke (Heston) in 1944 -- a union that must rank among Hollywood's longest. Was your family often involved in your work?

CH: Oh yes. On Ben-Hur, for instance, it was a long shoot. We were in Italy for nearly 11 months, and my wife and son were with us. It was a very tough shoot -- six-day workweeks were the norm. But of course we were all convinced that it was going to be the picture of the year if not the decade; and if it failed, MGM was going to turn into a parking lot.

B&N.com: Back up a minute. How did Fraser wind up as Moses in The Ten Commandments?

CH: My wife, Lydia, had been doing a film (The Atomic City), and had an offer for another film, but she had become pregnant and her doctor wouldn't allow her to come to Egypt for The Ten Commandments shoot. So, at five months into her term, she stayed home. DeMille, who was a very gentlemanly man, heard the news and expressed his regrets that she would not be coming with us. "When do you expect your child to be delivered?" he asked her. She told him the baby was due in early February. He did some mental arithmetic, and said: "If it's a boy, at the time that we're scheduled to shoot baby Moses in the bulrushes, he would be three months old. Perhaps your child will be in the picture."

B&N.com: Fraser was born after you returned from Egypt?

CH: Yes, and DeMille must have had somebody in the hospital, for the very first word from the outside world was a Telegram from DeMille, reading, "Congratulations: He's got the part."

B&N.com: I recall hearing that you had to resort to character when it actually came time for your son's performance.

CH: Yes, there are strict child-labor laws -- on the set for a maximum of four hours a day, and only forty minutes in front of the camera -- and the day of the shoot there was a very formidable woman from the Child Labor Department who carried my son on to the set. She came over to the water tank where we were going to shoot the scene, and I said to her, "All right, I'll take him now." She said, "Oh no sir, I have to have him all the time that he's on the lot." So I said in much the same tone that I'd used with Yul Brynner as Pharaoh, "Give me that child." She did.

B&N.com: Switching to another of your films, I hear you've shot a cameo appearance in Tim Burton's upcoming remake of Planet of the Apes. How did it go?

CH: Very tough makeup. Not the first tough makeup I have worn, but this was really a brute.

B&N.com: Very long in the chair?

CH: Two hours. That's a long time.

B&N.com: So you've changed sides, you're an ape this time. How does that feel?

CH: Interesting. [laughs]

B&N.com: And Mark Wahlberg is playing your original role?

CH: Yes. I saw him in The Perfect Storm; and he was very good in it. We saw one another on the lot, but we were shooting at different times. We exchanged compliments. I wished him good luck and told him, "I know it's going to be fine." And he said, "You're a tough act to follow."

B&N.com: Well if this turnabout is a hit, do you think people will be coming after you to play the Devil?

CH: There's an interesting idea. I can't do it as well as Max did. But hell, I act for a living. I'll play anybody!

B&N.com: Well now it's on the record.

CH: I've certainly had my share of great parts: Henry VIII, Andrew Jackson, Kings, Genghis Khan, Richelieu....

B&N.com: Quite a hall of fame. Has it made you something of a historian?

CH: It's part of your job to do the research on them. I played Michelangelo.

B&N.com: Oh yeah, opposite Rex Harrison's Pope in The Agony and the Ecstasy -- "When will you make an end?"

CH: When I'm finished. [laughs] I always loved doing that line!

B&N.com: It's evident.

CH: And the record shows that that was precisely the exchange between Pope Julius II and Michelangelo. Michelangelo was a very angry man. He didn't care about anything except carving marble. You know that game they play where they ask, "Which character from the past would you like to have dinner with?"

B&N.com: Yes.

CH: Don't pick Michelangelo. He wouldn't come. If he did come, he would not have shaved, or anything. And if you talked to him, he would say something rude.

B&N.com: Hmmm. What about El Cid?

CH: El Cid is one of my favorite films.

B&N.com: But would you have the Cid-ster over for chow?

CH: Oh yes, you could, because he was a knight, a fine man, and he had other things in mind. His goal was to drive the Moors out of Spain, which he succeeded in doing, before he got killed. But he would be fine, as long as you don't outrage him. Then you might die.

B&N.com: And we wouldn't want to do that.

CH: Nope. Absolutely not.

March 20, 2001

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