Charlton Heston

Alan Borg writes: Charlton Heston (obituary, April 7) was a civilised and scholarly man at heart. He also had a deep affection for Britain and accepted our invitation to become the US chairman of the Imperial War Museum’s appeal for the American Air Museum at Duxford. Fundraising is seldom fun but with Heston it was, involving a series of dinners in Hollywood, at one of which I found myself sitting next to the 90-year-old Bob Hope, who performed an impromptu comedy routine with Heston.

When Charlton and Lydia came to London in 1997 for a run of A. R. Gurney’s play Love Letters he phoned me up to say that he had never been to Lord’s and could I arrange it? The late Paul Getty generously lent us his box, and the Hestons watched the game with some puzzlement. At tea I walked him round the ground, and his unique, craggy features were recognised by several small boys; not knowing exactly who he was, they rushed up and asked him to sign their cricket bats. Heston did so with grace, observing that he had signed plenty of baseball bats but never a cricket bat. No doubt these bats will provide a conundrum for auctioneers of sports memorabilia in the future.

Robert Elegant writes: It was always “Call me Chuck” when Charlton Heston and I were planning a motion picture based on my thriller A Kind of Treason, set largely in Vietnam.

Walking back from lunch at Bertorelli’s he was hailed or stopped about every five paces. “I see,” he told me, “that authors have a recognition problem.”

Paul Clark writes: Charlton Heston was also the narrator of “The Giants of Philosophy” audio cassettes produced by Knowledge Products in 1990. If, as you say, he prepared himself for his roles by reading such exemplars as Freud and the King James Bible, then I think it befits him to mention his commentaries on Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dewey and Sartre. For reasons of integrity in his thought the phenomenon that was Charlton Heston will be sorely missed.

Beau Dare writes: I first met Heston, while working in Los Angeles as an actor/screenwriter in 1995 — not in the studio but in the local library where Heston was reading to children. When I moved to London we kept in touch, and even though the script I’d written for him never made it to the screen, Heston always encouraged me with my various film projects. He could drive a chariot with the best of them, and part the Red Sea with ease, but his kind words of encouragement were just as spectacular.