CHARLTON HESTON A Lifetime of LOVE

THE ICONIC ACTOR AND HIS WIFE, LYDIA, ENJOYED ONE OF HOLLYWOOD'S MOST ENDURING AND DEVOTED UNIONS

On location in Egypt while playing the prophet Moses in The Ten Commandments, Charlton Heston wrote and sketched in a journal to share with his wife. Pregnant with their first child, Lydia had been unable to accompany him overseas. “It was the first time he’d ever left her, beyond World War II,” their daughter, Holly Heston Rochell, tells Closer, adding that her father kept the diary “to make [Lydia] feel included.”

Charlton first set eyes on Lydia Clarke in a fundamentals of theater class at Northwestern University in Chicago. He decided on the spot that they should marry. “I obviously found the right girl the first time out,” he said in Charlton Heston: Hollywood’s Last Icon, a biography by Marc Eliot. “And I had the brains to recognize that.”