Charlton Heston, the legendary actor better known as Ben-Hur, Moses and that NRA spokesman, died today at home in Beverly Hills. More from the New York Times:
Every actor dreams of a breakthrough role, the part that stamps him in the public memory, and Mr. Hestonâs life changed forever when he caught the eye of the director Cecil B. De Mille. De Mille, who was planning his next biblical spectacular, âThe Ten Commandments,â looked at the young, physically imposing Mr. Heston and saw his Moses.
When the film was released in 1956, more than three and a half hours long and the most expensive that De Mille had ever made, Mr. Heston became a marquee name. Whether leading the Israelites through the wilderness, parting the Red Sea or coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets from God in hand, he was a Moses to remember.
Writing in The New York Times nearly 30 years afterward, when the film was re-released for a brief run, Vincent Canby called it âa gaudy, grandiloquent Hollywood classicâ and suggested there was more than a touch of âthe rugged American frontiersman of mythâ in Mr. Hestonâs Moses.
Coincidentally, Passover begins in two weeks.
