Celebs Who Are Only Children: Here's The List

• His mother's name was Lilla Charlton Heston (the Charlton was her maiden name).  She married a man who was the father of Charlton and Lilla Ann (she never used the Ann--just the initial A. in writing scholarly articles); they divorced, she married a man named Heston who adopted the two children and with whom Mother Heston had another child, Allen (may have misspelled the name).  Trust me--I studied with the sister for seven years and she was a national figure academically and there are various scholarships and awards named after her.  So, yes, Lilla was his mother, but the younger Lilla was his sister.  She died in 1984 at 56; I believe the half-brother also died, and the mother also died within the last ten years or so.

• Lilla was his MOTHER.

• Charlton Heston was by no means an only child.  In fact, he had a sister and a half-brother.  His sister, Lilla Heston, was my teacher and advisor at Northwestern University, a well-regarded scholar of Henry James, and a much better actor than her brother ever was.  She was an extremely charismatic teacher and we all looked forward to her solo performances every fall in the Faculty Recital--she did a reading of the wooing scene from "Richard III" (including giving us Anne's spit and R's reaction with such clarity that it remains a visual memory for me thirty or more years later) that made the audience gasp. While she did not have a large career as a performer outside of academia, she played Bernarda Alba in Frank Galati's Court Theatre (Chicago) production of that play and was extraordinary.  She also played Mrs. Alving opposite Galati's Pastor Manders in a production of Ibsen's "Ghosts" at Northwestern (with the younger characters played by off-Broadway goddess Jodie Markell and novelist/screenwriter Allison Burnett).  I can still remember Heston's anguish at the curtain of that play, as she has to decide whether to give Oswald the overdose of pills or not, just as her thundering demand for silence at the end of Lorca's play when her dead daughter, cut down from hanging herself, is brought on stage.  Whatever Chuck's many issues, they had little to do with not having siblings.  If anything, I suspect he had a bad case of sibling rivalry. And it makes me wonder how accurate the rest of your list is.

• Some of these people have half-siblings, so they can't count.  I have NO siblings, so I'm any only child. 

• I know where you're going with that...but she's still the only child of her mother and father.

• Yours truly is an only child as well!

• I'm pretty sure Carol Burnett has a younger half-sister.

• “Well, isn't that SPE-CIAL.” "We like ourselves, don't we?"

• My best friend is the only child of an only child, which came in handy when his grandmother kicked the bucket and it turned out she had millions stashed away in a bank account that nobody knew about...

• Only "only children" understand "only children"

• It's obviously a bunch of insecure narcissists with a lot of uncontrollable manic energy that they turn into Oscar gold (Pacino, Williams, Sinatra, Heston, Brody, Portman, Theron) or just act annoying (everyone else on the list).

• Thanks to Christian Freedom for tipping me off to this list.

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