Hollywood marriages often don’t last, but Charlton Heston and his wife, Lydia Clarke, were an exception. In this photo, they are with their son, Fraser, and later had a daughter named Holly.
A biographer wrote that when Charlton first met Lydia, he instantly fell in love. He said, “I obviously found the right girl the first time out. And I had the brains to recognize that,” as mentioned in the biography Charlton Heston: Hollywood’s Last Icon by Marc Eliot.
For Lydia, though, it wasn’t love at first sight. She thought Charlton was “arrogant, conceited, and supremely self-confident.” But after going on a date with him, she quickly fell in love. “And that was it, I was insanely in love with him.”
Charlton always stayed loyal to Lydia. He said, “The reason I’ve never cheated and never wanted to is that I happen to like my marriage. Nothing would be worth jeopardizing it.”
They married in 1944 and stayed happily together until Charlton’s death in 2008, sharing 64 years of love.