The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (191 page)

Charlton Heston
(Charles Carter) (1924–2008), b. St. Helen, Missouri
Heston has sometimes been cited as the clearest instance of the “monolithic” actor: the man who contributes to a film through his presence and the innate splendor of honest muscle and strong-jawed virtue. He was
the
screen hero of the 1950s and early 1960s, a proven stayer in epics, and a pleasing combination of piercing blue eyes and tanned beefcake. A closer examination of his record suggests how far this characterization may have offended the man himself. Heston began with the classics, has gone out of his way to retain contact with them, and still mixes lofty projects with dull adventures. But just as he seems slightly musclebound the longer he talks, so as an athletic hero his greatest distinction was the suggestion that he had hankerings to be articulate. It seems likely that he has been overrated by all his followers: by the intellectuals who were thrilled with his existence, and by the masses who loved such resolute handsomeness. On both counts he falls a little short—not as reflective as Mitchum, but not as gaily agile as Burt Lancaster.

Heston attended Northwestern University and played Peer Gynt and Mark Antony in two enterprising amateur 16mm films, both directed by David Bradley (42 and 49). He went on the professional stage, and by the late 1940s was playing Antony, Rochester, Heathcliffe, and Petruchio for CBS TV. This brought him to Hollywood’s attention, and in 1950 he made his professional debut in
Dark City
(William Dieterle). But it was Cecil B. De Mille who properly launched Heston as the tough circus owner in
The Greatest Show on Earth
(52). That part marked Heston down for ruggedness, and he played an Indian in
The Savage
(52, George Marshall) and Buffalo Bill in
Pony Express
(52, Jerry Hopper). It took King Vidor to draw out his sexual swagger in
Ruby Gentry
(52). Generally, since then, Heston has kept closer to gentlemanly heroics, needing to be goaded into action. Principally he was a costumed Paramount hero: as Andrew Jackson in
The President’s Lady
(53, Henry Levin);
Bad for Each Other
(53, Irving Rapper);
The Naked Jungle
(54, Byron Haskin);
Secret of the Incas
(54, Hopper);
Lucy Gallant
(55, Robert Parrish);
The Far Horizons
(55, Rudolph Maté); and
The Private War of Major Benson
(55, Hopper).

De Mille raised him from this rut to be a rather Aryan Moses in
The Ten Commandments
(56). After playing with Anne Baxter and Tom Tryon in
Three Violent People
(57, Maté) and enabling Welles to direct
Touch of Evil
(58), in which Heston went Mexican, he was used by William Wyler as the ranch foreman in
The Big Country
(58). He played Jackson again in
The Buccaneer
(58, Anthony Quinn), and then starred as
Ben-Hur
(59, Wyler), that thinking-man’s epic. This was the peak of his popular success, even if
Ben-Hur
is a tame movie. Heston was far better used in his two Samuel Bronston epics:
El Cid
(61, Anthony Mann) and
55 Days at Peking
(63, Nicholas Ray). The first is the finest expression of his Arthurian dignity, while the second coaxed out the most thoughtful acting he has yet shown, and, especially in the scene with the Chinese child, drew on a sense of human inadequacy beneath all Heston’s muscle.

He made
Diamond Head
(62, Guy Green), and as well as playing John the Baptist in
The Greatest Story Ever Told
(65, George Stevens), he made the thwarted
Major Dundee
(65, Sam Peckinpah); was Michelangelo in
The Agony and the Ecstasy
(65, Carol Reed); essayed the medieval in
The War Lord
(65, Franklin Schaffner); outpointed Olivier in
Khartoum
(66, Basil Dearden)—he played Gordon; and descended to lesser films:
Counterpoint
(67, Ralph Nelson);
Will Penny
(67, Tom Gries);
Planet of the Apes
(67, Schaffner)—a big commercial success;
Pro
(68, Gries); Antony in
Julius Caesar
(70, Stuart Burge);
Master of the Islands
(70, Gries); and
The Omega Man
(71, Boris Sagal). The decline was maintained with yet another return to Mark Antony: playing in and directing
Antony and Cleopatra
(72), a film that suggests that he learned more from Wyler than from Mann, Ray, Vidor, or Maté. He then played in
The Call of the Wild
(72, Ken Annakin); the detective in
Soylent Green
(73, Richard Fleischer); Richelieu for a day in
The Three Musketeers
(73, Richard Lester);
Earthquake
(74, Mark Robson); and
Airport 1975
(74, Jack Smight).

It was to Heston’s commercial credit that he still commanded leading roles in disaster pictures, just as he spearheaded the taste for epics fifteen years before. Nevertheless, after
Earthquake
he began to seem stranded by his films. It did not suit his dignity, or his duty as chairman of the American Film Institute, to prolong this sort of work. He might one day reveal himself as a closet old man, but by then strength will be impacted:
The Last Hard Men
(76, Andrew V. McLaglen);
Midway
(76, Smight);
Two-Minute Warning
(76, Larry Peerce); Henry VIII in
The Prince and the Pauper
(77, Richard Fleischer); and
Gray Lady Down
(78, David Greene).

In his sixties, Heston had become a spokesman for conservative causes. He has not really aged (as if rock withered), but he had a harder time finding parts that need his commitment. He has been in
The Awakening
(80, Mike Newell), a Bram Stoker adaptation; a fur trapper in
The Mountain Men
(80, Richard Lang); he acted in and directed
Mother Lode
(82), playing twins—the film was written and produced by his son, Fraser;
The Nairobi Affair
(84, Marvin J. Chomsky);
Proud Men
(87, William A. Graham); playing More in and directing
A Man for All Seasons
(88);
Original Sin
(89, Ron Satlof); as Long John Silver in
Treasure Island
(90, Fraser Heston);
The Little Kidnappers
(90, Donald Shebib); as God in
Almost an Angel
(90, John Cornell).

By 1990, one great characteristic was clear: he loved acting so much he would do small roles without being difficult. He also took a few leads in smaller pictures, and he gave his great voice as a narrator to many causes once espoused by his best films, such as the ownership of guns. Not far from eighty, he was a classic survivor: he was Sherlock Holmes in
The Crucifer of Blood
(91, Heston);
Crash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232
(92, Lamont Johnson);
Wayne’s World 2
(93, Stephen Surjik);
Tombstone
(93, George Pan Cosmatos);
True Lies
(94, James Cameron); as Brigham Young in
The Avenging Angel
(95, Craig R. Baxley);
In the Mouth of Madness
(95, John Carpenter);
Alaska
(96, Heston); the narrator of
The Jungle Book
(96, Stephen Sommers); as the Player King in
Hamlet
(96, Kenneth Branagh);
Gideon
(99, Claudia Hoover); the commissioner of the NFL in
Any Given Sunday
(99, Oliver Stone);
Toscano
(99, Dan Gordon);
Town & Country
(01, Peter Chelsom); surveying the new fiasco in
Planet of the Apes
(01, Tim Burton);
The Order
(01, Sheldon Lettich);
The Last Man Club
(01, Heston).

In 2002, Heston announced that he might be a victim of Alzheimer’s. But he appeared—as an interviewee—in
Bowling for Columbine
(02, Michael Moore). One might not share Heston’s view of guns, but the last view of him in that documentary—walking away, bowed by arthritis—was maybe the most moving scene in all of his work. When he died, it was easier to see that he had meant so much—no wonder he came to believe in his own character.

Kieran Hickey
(1936–93), b. Dublin, Ireland
I met Kieran Hickey, as far as my records can ascertain, early in 1960. This was on the steps of the National Film Theatre in London. He was coming out of a film, and I was in line for the next screening. As I look at the list of films I saw then, I rather hope that the movie was a Renoir or a Bresson
—Les Dames du Bois de Bologne
, perhaps. We were introduced, I’m sure, by Ross Devenish. All three of us, it turned out, were attached to what was then called the London School of Film Technique in Brixton. I had just started a course there, Kieran had just finished. But he would come in in the evenings to edit a film he was making, a documentary on James Joyce’s Dublin.

Immediately, on the steps of the NFT, we started talking. And I should say something about what words meant to Kieran. He took pains never to sound obviously (or only) Irish. But he was proud of the old adage that the best English was spoken in Dublin. He was a terrific, eloquent talker—gruff, tender, lyrical, sarcastic. You could feel yourself starting to think better and faster in his company. And if, like me, you were emerging slowly from a life of stammering, you had to learn to get on with talking, or use the stammer strategically to better his arguments. We got into the best talking relationship of my life.

Film was our chief topic. Kieran was a filmmaker, and a filmgoer, too. In the early 1960s, as he worked at a large department store and I worked for a scientific publishing house, we would confer by telephone in the day about what to see that night. In those days, London was a collective of repertory theatres, and we were busy charting the past of the medium we loved (and longed to work in). I have the list of those years still, and here is one week for 1961:

Affair in Havana
(Laslo Benedek) Queen’s, Bayswater
The Naked Dawn
(Edgar G. Ulmer) the Tolmer
Men in War
(Anthony Mann) the Tolmer
Saint Tropez Blues
(Marcel Moussy)
Cameo Royal
Blast of Silence
(Allen Baron)
Cameo Royal
A Taste of Honey
(Tony Richardson)
Leicester Square Theatre
Bonjour Tristesse
(Otto Preminger)
Cameo, Victoria
La Coup de Berger
(Jacques Rivette)
Everyman, Hampstead
Les 400 Coups
(François Truffaut)
Everyman, Hampstead
Dark Victory
(Edmund Goulding) N.F.T.
L’Avventura
(Michelangelo Antonioni) Classic, Tooting
Bellissima
(Luchino Visconti) N.F.T.
Beyond the Forest
(King Vidor) N.F.T.
Senso
(Luchino Visconti) N.F.T.

Using the library of the British Film Institute, we compiled filmographies for directors: in 1961, no such things were available. We were less scholars than people trying to determine what we needed to see. Again, in 1961, there was no more than a handful of books on movie subjects, and none of those claimed to be a work of reference. So we were working rather against the grain, discovering from somewhere that Anthony Mann, King Vidor, and Otto Preminger were as interesting and worthy as Ingmar Bergman, Antonioni, or Truffaut.

As we saw the films, we talked about them. It was Kieran who taught me that not to talk about something was to risk losing it, or letting it escape. We knew what we liked, and had fairly conceited attitudes, but we were led toward the nature of good style. That pursuit depended on our own reaction in the dark, and reading
Cahiers du Cinéma
—the only magazine that admired the directors we loved, and that tried to address the glory of those films. However, as our schoolboy French improved enough to keep up with
Cahiers
, we had to admit that acres of it were incoherent and pretentious. So our talk ruled.

Kieran went back to Dublin, having failed to find a way into the British picture business. But he was a family friend by then, an uncle to my children such as no actual family ties could provide, and a friend to both my wives. He began to make films, a couple of which I was lucky enough to write:
Faithful Departed
, a reverie on Dublin on Bloomsbury; a life of
Jonathan Swift;
a little short story,
A Child’s Voice;
several documentaries, including one on Irish movies in the years 1945–58; and a series of exceptional short fictional films that explored such topics as sexuality and education in Ireland
—Exposure, Criminal Conversation, Attracta
(adapted by William Trevor from his own story, and starring Wendy Hiller), and
The Rockingham Shoot
(from a John McGahern story).

Our talk continued: in letters, over the phone, and in frequent visits. And the talk made this book. I do not mean to shift the responsibility. Kieran helped in the research on all editions of this book; he commented and improved it at every page. But his deepest contribution was to the years of talk, the climate of taking pictures seriously, that made me think the book possible. If you feel the need and the urge to talk back to the book, then know that Kieran paved the way.

I visited Dublin in the summer of 1993. He was to have open-heart surgery; I was in England for my father’s funeral, and so I went over to Dublin for the weekend. He was a very hospitable man: there were visitors in and out of the house all the time, and he was busy making tea and cutting cake. We talked some more and watched a few things he had on tape—a documentary about Rossellini;
Bitter Victory
in a nicely letterboxed format; and Stephen Frears’s
The Snapper
, which had just played on television. We talked about this book, as it limped along.