For 10 years in the middle of the last century, Charlton Heston, who died aged 84, personified epic cinema. To filmgoers he resembled a piece of living statuary, with a quarried, strong-jawed handsomeness that could suggest almost any historical or ancient-historical date, plus a baritone voice formed as if to express heroic struggle. The man and the epoch came together in the 1950s, when Hollywood's Roman and Biblical epics served not only to reflect the bygone triumphs and tragedies of a world war but also to fight a new war, that for audiences, waged with the novel medium of television.

Surprisingly, since he would forever be associated with them, Charlton Heston made only two ancient-historical epics. He was a ruggedly aging Moses in The Ten Commandments, with the character's older, bearded version clearly modelled on Michelangelo's statue. In Ben-Hur Heston endured the whips and scorns of a tyrannical Roman empire as a Jewish slave turned Christian hero, with the film's chariot race as a spectacular transition point.