Charlton Heston

I recorded El Cid recently on video - it's a popular film for filling the Saturday afternoon schedules, and I noticed that it's on yet again next week. So I whiled away a wet Sunday afternoon last week by watching it.
I really don't know why I love Charlton Heston, his right-wing views in recent years were a bit scary, but that doesn't make you a bad actor; he died this year from Alzhiemer's, but he was 88, so had a good innings, as they say. And in spite of becoming a leading light in the NRA he was a very early public advocate of civil rights, long before it became fashionable. So, a fascinatingly contradictory character.
Maybe it's because Ben Hur was the first wide-screen spectacular I'd ever seen. I was at an impressionable age, about 10 or 11, and it had an enormous impact on me. It was in the days when cinemas had only one screen, and it was huge. Ben Hur was in Todd AO as well, so it really was a massive experience for me.
CH was sold into slavery, endured the galleys, was rescued by the Romans, and became a hero in the arenas of Imperial Rome; he then escaped, bumped into Jesus who healed his sister and mother from leprosy, and found his long-lost love after his years away - what a story! I can't think of any, any actor, past or present, who could have carried it off. But especially now - Tom Cruise? Harrison Ford? I don't think so.
There's something about his expression - it's the stricken integrity in his eyes - you just know that he's always going to do the right thing, and in El Cid he has this quality in spades. Again, he endures all manner of hardships and humiliations, but prevails. The final scene has passed into cinema iconography, he's dead, but leads his men to victory while strapped to his horse on a Spanish beach. Tremendous even by Heston's standards!
He went on to be Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, and John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told, then he took a different tack and made Will Penny, one of the very first 'revisionist' westerns.
He went on to make some fascinating films - science-fiction such as Soylent Green and The Omega Man, both excellent, and then his piece de resistance, Planet of the Apes. What a career!