Word: heston
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Offscreen, Heston is president of the Screen Actors Guild and a frequent industry spokesman. He has made four tours from Nigeria to Australia for the State Department. Last week he spent two days in Washington testifying before a Senate subcommittee on community-antenna television. As early as 1961, when most of his colleagues were ignoring the Negro revolution, Heston joined a civil rights demonstration in Oklahoma City. In 1963 he publicly attacked Hollywood's "sorry record" of discrimination...
Directors say that Heston is the most conscientious actor in town. He subjected himself to a crash reading program on the Dead Sea Scrolls and a shelf full of theological tomes before tackling The Ten Commandments. He has uncomplainingly walked sandalless on his flat feet up Mount Sinai, and for his role of Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy jammed a plastic noodle into his nose to push it properly out of joint. He took a lengthy driver's course in the chariot for Ben-Hur, polished an English accent with a speech teacher and nightly tapings...
...Heston is simply a professional perfectionist. "Like any art," he says, "acting is imperfectible. That is why acting is more interesting than cutting chicken or selling insurance, which are perfectible, I suppose. Hemingway finally blew his brains out because he realized that for him there were no more chances to try for perfection...
Skinny Years. The pursuit of perfection began at the age of five when Heston played his first role in the one-room schoolhouse he attended in northern Michigan. At Northwestern University, he worked with Classmates Patricia Neal and Ralph Meeker, met another hopeful actress, Lydia Clarke, who has been his wife for 22 years. After some skinny years in Manhattan, he got a supporting role in Katharine Cornell's Antony and Cleopatra ("Miss Cornell is a tall woman and likes to have tall actors around"). From there, it was roles in TV and a lead in his first film...
...their affluence, the Hestons, their son Fraser, 11 (who played the infant Moses in The Ten Commandments), and adopted daughter, Holly Ann, 5, live sedately in an eight-room house on a ridge high over Coldwater Canyon near Hollywood. His major indulgence is a private tennis court, onto which he likes to coax name pros, who regularly clobber him. Otherwise, "Chuck" Heston, as friends call him, mostly stays inside doing calisthenics and culling scripts. It doesn't bother him to be called a square. "So," he says, "were Moses...