Smash hit

After divorce, his mother married a businessman, Chet Heston. Growing up in the Depression gave the young Heston a lasting admiration for hard graft. Later he was to be the most conscientious of stars, and strove to get films finished on time, on budget. As the producer Walter Mirisch once told him: “We sure lost a great first assistant director when you took up acting.”

Heston attended the local New Trier high school, which had a good drama course. He took part in all the school plays and worked at weekends with a local drama group. At Northwestern University, to which he won a scholarship, he met a fellow drama student, Lydia Clarke, whom he married in 1944. He had an uneventful war in the Army Air Corps, when he was based in the Aleutian Islands. Afterwards he and his wife moved to New York to begin their acting careers in earnest.

In 1947 Heston heard that Katharine Cornell, First Lady of American Theatre, was casting for Antony and Cleopatra and bluffed his way into an audition. Though he won only the tiny part of Proculeius, the cachet of having worked with Cornell on Broadway got Heston in to the new world of television.

Television drama was in its infancy, and snubbed by the Hollywood directors. It was left to a group of youths to mould the new art form. The Cornell card landed Heston a role in the CBS production of Julius Caesar and this led to more major roles in television dramas. Heston acted in five Shakespearean productions in two years, invaluable experience for a young actor. The early days of television were, he recalled, “like the beginning of Hollywood — Griffith and Chaplin and DeMille bouncing around in touring cars with the camera on the end of a board”.

On the East Coast the septugenarian Cecil B. DeMille was still directing films. One day he spotted young Heston driving around the Paramount lot. Heston was visiting Hollywood for an audition and waved cheerily at the grand old man of film. DeMille, it is recorded, decided instantly to offer Heston the part of the circus manager in The Greatest Show on Earth. DeMille’s homage to circus life included stars such as Dorothy Lamour and James Stewart, but Heston held his own. After the film’s successful release, one enchanted cinemagoer wrote to DeMille to compliment the cast. “And I was amazed”, the correspondent concluded, “at how well the circus manager did in there with the real actors”.

Heston made ten films in the next three years. Ruby Gentry (1953) directed by King Vidor, was a hit, and showed that he could play a romantic lead. There were Westerns and the first of his biographical films, as Andrew Jackson in The President’s Lady (1953).

But Heston was being prepared for loftier things by his mentor: the role of Moses in DeMille’s next biblical extravaganza, The Ten Commandments (1956).

Heston parted the Red Sea with panache. It confirmed Heston as a top name. As he remarked of his good fortune when he got the part: “If you can’t make a career out of two DeMilles, you’ll never make it.” As with all his historical roles, Heston came to the role having read everything available on the subject: for Moses, he read Freud, the historian James Henry Breasted, and the King James Bible. Like Olivier, he was also keen to get the make-up and costume just right. Few stars have sported such an array of beards as Heston.

By the mid-Fifties, the top Hollywood directors were sending Heston scripts. Orson Welles cast him in the minor classic, Touch of Evil (1957). William Wyler directed him opposite Gregory Peck in The Big Country (1958), a pairing which produced one of the best bare-knuckle fist fights in cinema.

Heston made a good impression on Wyler, particularly in his sporting acceptance of second billing to Peck. Soon afterwards MGM asked Wyler to direct an expensive remake of the silent classic Ben-Hur. It was a gamble to save the studio’s ailing finances.

Wyler’s instinct to cast Heston as brawny, kindly Ben-Hur proved right. Heston was not only excellent in the quiet family scenes but had trained himself to be a competent charioteer and oarsman. Ben-Hur won nine Oscars, including Heston’s.

Although Ben-Hur was the best of Heston’s spectaculars, there were several good ones to come: El Cid (1961), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), in which Heston played John the Baptist, and Khartoum (1966). For the last he was kitted out by the London costumiers Bermans, which made a replica of General Gordon’s tunic to fit his hulkier frame. He congratulated the tailor on his skill at re-creating the costume. “Oh, it wasn’t difficult, sir,” came the reply. “We made the original, you see. We still have the patterns.”