At home in all roles

Legendary actor Charlton Heston, who died recently, played lead roles in Biblical epics with aplomb. He performed equally well in action films, writes Ervell E. Menezes

Charlton Heston was unmatchable both on and off the screen

For me the legendary Charlton Heston is Judah Ben-Hur in that multi-Oscar winner Ben-Hur, and the spectacular chariot race is deeply embedded in memory because I was a teenager then, but in latter years the aspect, which was even more revealing, was the falling out between two great friends — Ben-Hur (Heston) and Masala (Stephen Boyd). That Heston won the Best Actor Oscar for his 1959 effort is now history but the equally handsome Boyd was not far behind though he never achieved the status of Heston, who played larger-than-life historical characters.

Whether he played Moses in The Ten Commandments or Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, he was equally at home in these iconic roles. Those were the years of Biblical epics and he was Hollywood’s number one for those parts. He was John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Even Told but he had a wide repertoire and was equally at home in action films and quite at home as General Gordon in Khartoum. The Poseidon Adventure he did in the 1970s when he was ageing. His best days were the late 1950s and early 1960s. Charlton Heston was six foot four inches tall. His granite-hewn features and deep sonorous voice made him an unmatchable persona.

Born John Charles Carter in Evanston, Illinois, he took his grandfather’s looks but was a shy, skinny youth (a nerd by his own admission) who took acting lessons before serving in the US Air Force for three years. After working on Broadway in the early 1950s, he made his debut in The Greatest Show on Earth. The rest, as they say, is history.

"I have played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses in my career. The shadow of those guys rubs off a little bit and has given me a kind of iconic identity, which I don’t deserve. If that doesn’t create an ego problem, nothing does," he once said. But he could separate his personal life from these iconic roles unlike Peter Sellers, who admitted that he never knew who he was.

Off the screen he was one of the world’s famous faces, a high-profile campaigner for civil rights and was next to the podium when Martin Luther King Jr made that famous I have a dream speech. Before he became a conservative Republican, he had campaigned for Democratic presidential candidates like Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy.

He was also an unapologetic president of America’s National Rifle Association. He had shades of John Wayne and a penchant for aggression. He once waived his musket over his head and told gun control advocates that they would not get his gun unless they pry it "from my cold, dead hands."

But in his last few years he was afflicted by Alzheimer’s and it was painful for his friends and family to see this iconic star fade away. His wife Lydia was at his bedside when he died at his Beverly Hills home on April 5.