Charlton Heston won the Academy Award for Best Actor as Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish prince betrayed and enslaved by his childhood friend, now a Roman commander, whose quest for vengeance carries him from galley-slave ships to the legendary chariot race and ultimately toward an unexpected spiritual reckoning. Director William Wyler's epic swept a then-record 11 Academy Awards, anchored by a nine-minute chariot race filmed with thousands of extras and no special effects, still considered one of cinema's greatest action sequences. A defining example of golden-age Hollywood spectacle, its scale has rarely been matched since.