Word: hurs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Heston, who died April 5 at 84, was unique among Hollywood stars. Of no other actor could you say, He was born to play Moses, Ben-Hur, El Cid, Michelangelo. At the very moment Marlon Brando was freeing film-acting from good manners, Heston proved there was thrilling life in the endangered tradition of speaking well and looking great. And when he wasn't the movies' avatar of antique glory, he was our emissary to the future: the last man on earth in two dystopian science-fiction films, Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man. Heston was the alpha...
...Judah Ben-Hur, Heston is still lean; he hasn't quite grown into the Greek physique he'd soon acquire. His thin face is dominated by a high, mile-wide brow, which made him a thinking-man hero - and, in his scenes with Stephen Boyd's Messala, Judah's boyhood friend and later deadly rival, startlingly intense. Gore Vidal, who worked on the script, said that the subtext was that the two men had once been lovers. Heston called that preposterous, but homoeroticism was potent in many epics of the time (oh, those Greeks; oh, them Romans!). Anyway, both actors...
...beckons the Israelites to walk on through. That last bit was a special effect, but Heston's Biblical authority was persuasively real. Moreover, The Ten Commandments was a huge hit, ensuring that other religious epics would be made. Heston starred in the biggest, Ben-Hur, which won a then-record 11 Oscars and was the top-grossing film of the decade...
...excitement of that nine-minute horse race, Ben-Hur was long and logy. But with Heston now the go-to hero, it guaranteed that he'd be cast in his finest role: el Cid. In this Anthony Mann film, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar is an 11th-century Spanish soldier who tempers force with wisdom, seeking a peace with the large local Islamic minority it is his job to subdue, and preaching moderation in the Court of King Ferdinand. Almost a pacifist warrior, he spends most of the film debating large issues with other beautiful people (Sophia Loren, John Fraser...
...role in the 1966 movie version, but lost out to Paul Scofield, who died last month.) Having cut his great white teeth on Broadway, Heston was the rare mid-century movie star who returned to the stage. Laurence Olivier directed him in The Tumbler, the year after Ben-Hur. He did Long Day's Journey Into Night with Deborah Kerr and Macbeth with Vanessa Redgrave.In 1999 he and his wife, Lydia Clarke, read the Love Letters play in London...