Charlton Heston did extraordinary things onscreen—from parting the Red Sea as Moses in The Ten Commandments to playing the fictional prince Judah Ben-Hur in Ben-Hur, a role that earned him an Oscar. Early on in his career, he even considered the movie set a kind of sanctuary. “The studio was where I lived, really…where the work was,” he wrote in his 1995 memoir In the Arena.
Yet amid the dazzling highs of his Hollywood career, Heston cherished something much quieter: time alone at home. “Making films or plays is inescapably a collective undertaking, and many of the people who do it are designated public property,” he wrote. “Still, you need time alone, all by yourself. As a guy brought up in the Michigan woods, I really need it.”
Born in 1923 in Evanston, Illinois, Heston was raised in the “backwoods” of the Great Lakes State before becoming an actor and making homes for himself in New York City and Beverly Hills.
Below, we’ve rounded up 10 photos of Charlton Heston’s dwellings, including the sprawling California estate he called home for decades until his death in 2008.
The actor and his wife in their Hell’s Kitchen home.
Photo: George Torrie / New York Daily News via Getty ImagesNew York state of mind
Heston married Lydia Clarke in 1944. The couple kept an apartment in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, where they’re pictured here in 1951. In his memoir, Heston described the place as a “nineteenth-century railroad flat: four flights of walk-up to two tiny rooms and an alcove for the bed, with two narrow windows in the street wall. There was no heat, but in cold weather the gas oven heated our small space pretty well (in the summer you were out of luck).” He also called it a “steal” at $30 a month and joked that the “cockroaches [were] thrown in for free.”