Did Heston deserve his Oscar?
Anyone see the following five performances for 1959. Who would you have voted for.
Laurence Harvey, Room at the Top
Charlton Heston, Ben-Hur
Jack Lemmon, Some Like It Hot
Paul Muni, The Last Angry Man
James Stewart, Anatomy of a Murder
Considering the discussion, this excerpt from my book seems to be appropriate:
My freshman year at the UW found me doing seven plays back-to-back
at the University’s Penthouse Theater, a theater-in-the-round. Because
they were big contributors to the Drama Department, every Penthouse
production was also presented for two performances at the Washington
Athletic Club, located in downtown Seattle. These performances
were done on a Monday and Tuesday night.
Until a few years ago, the Oscars were always presented on a Monday
night and, on this particular Oscar night in 1960, we were doing a
performance of some play at the Athletic Club. There was no Green
Room at the club, so when an actor was waiting off-stage for his cue,
he’d stand in the lobby…where a television set was broadcasting the
Awards.
I don’t recall the exact line, but there was a moment in this particular
play when an actor runs on stage and announces,
“Have you heard
that ‘so-and-so’ did ‘such-and-such’?” The other actors on stage then respond
with something like,
“Oh, my God! That’s terrible!”For this particular performance, the actor who ran on stage decided
to ad-lib, and came out with:
“Have you heard that Charlton Heston and
Simone Signoret have won the Academy Awards?”Whereupon, the rest of the cast responded with:
“Oh, my God!
That’s terrible!”I don’t think that the audience got it, but the cast certainly did.
Incidentally, the actor who did the ad-lib was named Rod Whitaker,
who later became a well-known novelist named
“Trevanian”. I believe
that his best-known work was
The Eiger Sanction, which was made into a
1975 movie starring Clint Eastwood.
Also, one of the actors who responded to Whitaker was David Seidler, who just won the writing Oscar for
The King's Speech.
