Colin Fleming
Barnes & Noble via The Christian Science Monitor
August 28, 2017
Dense biographies about high-wattage Hollywood stars with limited acting chops can be tricky business for a writer and a reader alike. The former has to instill in the latter a belief in why we should care beyond yet another exegesis of celebrity, while readers, ideally, find a way to open themselves to seeing old works anew.
Marc Eliot has this kind of challenge in hand with Charlton Heston: Hollywood’s Last Icon – a voluminous, and possibly definitive, study one of the big screen’s paragons of brawn and masculinity. Its subject looms large in our cultural memory while remaining a limited thespian whose go-to move was leaning forward, iron jaw extended, as if forever contemplating where to get a good steak.
But if Heston lacked range, he didn’t lack self-consciousness. He was an ardent diarist, and those writings are counted on to provide new vantage points, Heston’s prose teaming up with Eliot’s, as it were, in a joint mission to tell us why we should care more than we already do about this Tinsel Town icon.
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