An Icon of cinema. A man with a god like figure. A legend. Charlton Heston is gone.

By Matt Holmes / June 24, 2011

I thought Charlton Heston would live forever. He has always been a God to so many, he represented the kind of figures that Greek Mythology was built around. During my school years, it would be Heston I would think of when the teachers spoke about the larger than life figures with perfect physiques on mount Olympus. When they spoke of Achilles, when they spoke of Hercules - I would think of Heston. A storm hit my part of the U.K. last night as Charlton Heston left the world. God was pissed at the passing of one of his finest children.

When I think of Heston, I first think of the amazing amount of epics he inevitably would star in. No-one with a physique and square jawed presence like Heston was going to avoid sword and sandal epics for long. Beating out Gladiator by forty years with one of the greatest revenge/love epics in history was Ben-Hur, the film that forever ingrained Heston into the minds of the public and was assured repeat showings on t.v. every Christmas, Easter or Holidays the networks could find. The one's where you just sit in front of the t.v. all afternoon long and marvel at what you are witnessing, wishing you had a cent of Heston's presence in life. He won his only Oscar nomination and eventual win for that movie, a legendary performance - the kind that we so rarely see these days but when Russell Crowe did in eight years ago we all flocked back to see it again. I would love to see more epics on this grand scale, shame that Troy and Alexander didn't live up to their potential.

What I loved so much about growing up watching Heston's movies on t.v, was that he simply starred in so many similar flicks. You knew if you saw him in Ben-Hur then you could easily find one or two other epic films where would be doing the same gig. For after Ben-Hur came El Cid - where he and Sophia Loren lit up the screen in classical Hollywood fashion. They called it The GREATEST ROMANCE and ADVENTURE in a THOUSAND YEARS, and you know it's rarely been beaten since. It may not be quite as widely acknowledged as Ben-Hur but I thought it was an amazing piece of cinema that has only recently been given a good treatment on DVD. Of course before both of those flicks came The Ten Commandments, a role that really cemented Heston as a Hollywood star. Who else could really star as Moses and make you believe he was touched by God? Like I say to me, he always felt like a God...

In the early 60's he couldn't quite shake off the epic roles. He would appear in The Greatest Story Ever Told, the rather brilliant The Agony and the Ecstasy for the great Carol Reed (recommended for those looking for a Heston movie that's not widely talked about) and Khartoum alongside Laurence Olivier. At the end of the decade he would get a second coming as astronaut George Taylor in Planet of the Apes - one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time and one whose poster has sprawled across my desktop background for so long now. He was quite simply - amazing in that movie, so much so that he would almost be re-tooling that character year in, year out for the next ten years at least, just as he was with his epics the decade previous. It's a fascinating performance. Full of energy, charisma - he is bigger than the film - bigger than the apes and then to see that all crashing down is a sight to behold. Planet of the Apes is my favourite film of his, hands down. His leading man performance is the pinnacle of the genre. I will watch that tonight. The Omega Man - the second attempt at cracking Richard Matheson and until a few months ago, the best adaptation. Although the film may turn into camp, there was nothing joky about Heston's performance. Sad, irritated (night after night, he plays chess with himself) - treats the mutants (not vampires in that flick) as if they were nothing but of course that's all he's got. He is losing his sanity. His portrayal of the character Robert Neville was far closer to the novel than one Will Smith gave and I can't help but see Heston's face when I think of the character from the book.

Soylent Green! Richard Fleischer's flawed epic which would again star the captain of sc-fi fighting off the threat of a dystopian world. Like The Omega Man, it ain't the greatest film in the world but my God if Heston's performance doesn't just suck you in and it's themes and concerns are still very much warranted in this day and age. He was a known environmentalist and that film if it were given the right re-treatment and campaign could be his most important contribution to the world for years to come - the way we are destroying Earth. Hope you don't forget Earthquake and of course the Jack Smight disaster movie Airport 1975 (whose spoof Airplane is far better known) and it would once again cement Heston as the action hero, though the film wasn't fantastic. He would star in a better Smight movie a few years later with Midway alongside another Hollywood legend Henry Fonda. Heston would barely find any good work after Midway for at least ten years. He returned for some good supporting gigs though in the 90's as Henry Hooker in Tombstone, Spencer Trilby in True Lies, the forgotten John Carpenter movie In the Mouth of Madness, Player King in Hamlet and of course the narrator in Armageddon. Who better to voice Man's impending doom than the man who fought off the end of the world for so long? Heston would do a few more things in the last ten years of his life, including a small cameo in Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday and his REALLY FUN cameo in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes where his career had come full circle. He played a dying chimpanzee nearing the end of his life, a remarkable career turn around for the guy who fought of the Apes over thirty years earlier. It would be his last significant role.

And I would be doing Heston disservice If I didn't mention his leading role in one of the greatest films of all time, Touch of Evil. He remarkably was cast as a Mexican, memorably joked about by Tim Burton in Ed Wood but again it's an amazing film - and he starred in so many. Most actors are lucky if they get one great film but Heston had at least 5.

They don't make them like Charlton Heston anymore. It's hard to believe anyone who looked like he did would become a star in the 21st century but anyone who calls Heston a bad actor is a little delusional.

You don't star in so many great movies if you couldn't act. We lost a God figure today and he was such a nice man too. What a screen presence, what an icon!