“She lived an amazing life. At 95 years old she knew a lot of famous people from John F. Kennedy to Nancy and Ronald Reagan. My mother was very active in the civil rights movement and even marched with Dr Martin Luther King. She had a great love for photography and has travelled all over the world. She was prone to sea-sickness, but she sailed every sea in the world” said Heston’s son, Fraser.
Lydia first met Charlton in drama class at Northwestern University and married him in 1944 in Asheville, North Carolina, just before he went overseas to serve in the Army Air Force during World War II. After the war, the Hestons moved to New York, where they pursued acting careers and Lydia Clarke performed on Broadway opposite Ralph Bellamy in Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story, which premiered in 1949.
In 1952, she co-starred with Gene Barry in her first feature, the Cold War thriller The Atomic City. She played a circus girl in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), which starred her husband, and during production was asked by Cecil B. DeMille’s publicist to help take some on-set photos.
