Sixty-six years ago today, April 4, 1960, Charlton Heston stood at the podium at the 32nd Academy Awards and accepted the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in Ben-Hur.
Before the night was over, the film had won eleven of its twelve nominations, setting a record that has never been broken outright and has only been tied twice in the 66 years since.
It is Easter weekend, which means Ben-Hur is airing somewhere on television right now, as it does every Holy Week. Most people watching it have no idea what it took to make it.
What Is Ben-Hur?
Ben-Hur is a 1959 epic religious drama directed by William Wyler and starring Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur, a wealthy Jewish prince in first-century Jerusalem whose childhood friendship with a Roman tribune named Messala, played by Stephen Boyd, collapses into betrayal, slavery, and ultimately one of the most famous revenge stories in cinema history.
The film follows Ben-Hur from his arrest and enslavement as a galley slave, through a sea battle, through his rescue and return to power, to the climactic chariot race in the arena at Rome, and finally to his encounter with Jesus Christ during the crucifixion.
It runs approximately three hours and thirty minutes.
The film was adapted from Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, one of the bestselling American novels of the 19th century, which had already been made into a 1925 silent film on which a young William Wyler had served as an assistant director.
By 1959 Wyler had already won two Best Director Oscars, for Mrs. Miniver in 1942 and The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946. Ben-Hur would give him his third.
Who Almost Played Judah Ben-Hur
Charlton Heston was not the first choice. He was not the second choice. He may not have been anywhere near the top of the list.
Burt Lancaster was offered the role and turned it down, saying he found the script boring and felt the film was belittling to Christianity.
Paul Newman was offered the role and turned it down, his stated reason has become one of the most quoted lines in Hollywood history. He said he did not have the legs to wear a tunic. Marlon Brando was considered.
Rock Hudson was considered. Kirk Douglas was interested and was turned down in favor of Heston, who was formally cast on January 22, 1958, and paid $250,000 for thirty weeks of work plus travel expenses for his family.
Heston had had a significant breakthrough with The Ten Commandments in 1956 but was not yet a superstar in the conventional sense.
He took the role. He trained obsessively, learning to drive a chariot, to ride horses, to throw a javelin, to sword fight, to row. He spent months doing things that most leading men in 1958 would have delegated entirely to stunt performers.
The Production Was A Near-Disaster
Ben-Hur had the largest budget of any film ever produced at the time, $15.175 million, which in 2026 dollars represents a sum that would make even modern blockbuster producers nervous.
It was shot primarily at Cinecittà Studios in Rome across two years. The production was divided into three separate units shooting simultaneously to manage the scale.
The screenplay credit became a public legal dispute before the film was even released. Multiple writers contributed to the script, Maxwell Anderson, S.N. Behrman, Gore Vidal, and Christopher Fry among them, but the Screen Writers’ Guild awarded sole credit to Karl Tunberg after arbitration.
Director Wyler publicly campaigned against the ruling, believing Christopher Fry deserved credit. The Guild took out advertisements in trade newspapers accusing Wyler of undermining their arbitration process.
When Ben-Hur eventually won eleven Oscars but lost Best Adapted Screenplay, its only loss, many observers attributed the result to the screenplay controversy.
Heston, in his acceptance speech for Best Actor, specifically thanked Christopher Fry.
Gore Vidal, one of the uncredited contributors, later claimed he had inserted a gay subtext into the film, specifically depicting Judah and Messala as former lovers whose falling-out drives the entire plot.
Vidal said he broached the idea to Wyler, who approved it but told him explicitly: do not tell Charlton Heston, because “Chuck will fall apart.”
Heston always denied any knowledge of this. Wyler denied it too. Film critic F.X. Feeney, comparing script drafts, concluded that Vidal’s contributions to the script were significant and extensive.
The Chariot Race
The chariot race is the reason people are still watching Ben-Hur in 2026. It runs just over nine minutes.
It took five weeks to film. The arena built at Cinecittà to contain it covered eighteen acres, at the time, the largest single film set ever constructed. Building it took over a year.
Over 2,500 horses were involved in the production as a whole. The chariot race sequence alone required nine chariot teams of four horses each, and the horses were trained for up to six months specifically for this sequence, learning first to pull chariots individually, then in pairs, then in threes, then as full quartets at full gallop.
Six Panavision 65mm cameras shot the race simultaneously. Over one million feet of Eastman Color film was exposed during the entire Italian production.
The chariot race’s budget alone accounted for nearly ten percent of the film’s total cost.
Charlton Heston trained with stunt coordinator Yakima Canutt for months and ultimately drove his own chariot team in the controlled shots and close-ups.
The high-speed racing action was performed by professional stuntmen, most notably Canutt’s son Joe Canutt, who doubled for Heston.
In the most famous moment of the entire sequence, the shot where Ben-Hur is nearly thrown from his chariot but clings on as it launches over wreckage, Joe Canutt was unexpectedly launched into the air in a real accident.
Wyler saw the footage, recognized it was extraordinary, and kept it in the film.
A young assistant director on the production who handled some of the chariot race retakes was a man in his late twenties named Sergio Leone, who would go on to invent the spaghetti Western, discover Clint Eastwood, and direct Once Upon a Time in America.
Ben-Hur’s Long Standing Success
Ben-Hur won eleven Academy Awards at the 32nd ceremony on April 4, 1960: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor for Hugh Griffith, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, Best Film Editing, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Mixing, Best Costume Design, and Best Production Design.
The only nomination it did not convert was Best Adapted Screenplay.
No film has won more. Two have tied it: Titanic in 1998 and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2004. Both required enormous productions with enormous ambitions to reach eleven wins.
Ben-Hur did it in 1960, without digital effects, without green screens, with stuntmen flying off chariots in real accidents, on the largest film set ever built, in a production that nearly collapsed under its own weight before it ever reached an audience.
The film became the highest-grossing movie of 1959 and earned back its production cost roughly ten times over at the box office. It still airs on television every Easter. It is still watched. It is still extraordinary.
Charlton Heston was 35 years old when he accepted the Oscar. He thanked Christopher Fry, the man who wrote words he was told to pretend came from someone else.
