Letters: Charlton Heston: The real story

Once again, Stuart Caesar tries to appear reasonable and once again, he fails abysmally.

In the past, Mr. Caesar has shown precious little understanding of political and economic theories like socialism and communism, so discovering he was equally misinformed about capitalism is not a surprise.

But, in criticizing Fatimah Ali's critique of Glenn Beck's dissing of Martin Luther King Jr. and his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, he makes the bizarre and unrelated point that Charlton Heston (Oscar-winning actor, gun-rights activist and archconservative) was in Washington in 1963 at the same rally.

Not to downplay that, but with an estimated crowd of 250,000, lots of people were in D.C. that day. The Hollywood contingent alone included Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte and many others.

As a big fan of Heston, Mr. Caesar should know that Heston was a complex man and far more interesting than the "sound-bite" style of contemporary conservative politics.

Early on, Heston was quite liberal, supporting Adlai Stevenson and JFK for president and actively protesting the Vietnam War.

After JFK's assassination, Heston, along with many other Hollywood actors, called for much stricter gun control. (Yeah, that Charlton Heston!)

But, like many people of his generation, as he aged, Heston's political views changed, and he ultimately became a Republican and supported Ronald Reagan and Poppa George Bush. His views on gun control also hardened, and he became a big supporter of the National Rifle Association.

And all of this was his right, but it certainly wasn't where his politics were at in 1963 during the March on Washington!

Heston, the man and the great American actor, deserves to have the complexities of his political thoughts considered fairly and fully.

Charlton Heston, Epic Film Star and Voice of N.R.A., Dies at 84

Charlton Heston, who appeared in some 100 films in his 60-year acting career but who is remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo, died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 84.

His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Bill Powers, who did not specify a cause. In August 2002, Mr. Heston announced that he had received a diagnosis of neurological symptoms “consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.”

“I’m neither giving up nor giving in,” he said.

Every actor dreams of a breakthrough role, the part that stamps him in the public memory, and Mr. Heston’s life changed forever when he caught the eye of the director Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille, who was planning his next biblical spectacular, “The Ten Commandments,” looked at the young, physically imposing Mr. Heston and saw his Moses.

When the film was released, in 1956, more than three and a half hours long and the most expensive that De Mille had ever made, Mr. Heston became a marquee name. Whether leading the Israelites through the wilderness, parting the Red Sea or coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets from God in hand, he was a Moses to remember.

Charlton Heston had been suffering from Alzheimer’s. Credit Wyatt Counts

Writing in The New York Times nearly 30 years afterward, when the film was re-released for a brief run, Vincent Canby called it “a gaudy, grandiloquent Hollywood classic” and suggested there was more than a touch of “the rugged American frontiersman of myth” in Mr. Heston’s Moses.

The same quality made Mr. Heston an effective spokesman, off screen, for the causes he believed in. Late in life he became a staunch opponent of gun control. Elected president of the National Rifle Association in 1998, he proved to be a powerful campaigner against what he saw as the government’s attempt to infringe on a constitutional guarantee — the right to bear arms.

In Mr. Heston, the N.R.A. found its embodiment of pioneer values — pride, independence and valor. In a speech at the N.R.A.’s annual convention in 2000, he brought the audience to its feet with a ringing attack on gun-control advocates. Paraphrasing an N.R.A. bumper sticker (“I’ll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands”), he waved a replica of a colonial musket above his head and shouted defiantly, “From my cold, dead hands!”

Mr. Heston’s screen presence was so commanding that he was never dominated by mammoth sets, spectacular effects or throngs of spear-waving extras. In his films, whether playing Buffalo Bill, an airline pilot, a naval captain or the commander of a spaceship, he essentially projected the same image — muscular, steely-eyed, courageous. If critics used terms like “marble-monumental” or “granitic” to describe his acting style, they just as often praised his forthright, no-nonsense characterizations.

After his success in “The Ten Commandments,” Mr. Heston tried a change of pace. Working for another legendary Hollywood director, Orson Welles, he played a Mexican narcotics investigator in the thriller “Touch of Evil,” in which Welles himself played a murderous police captain in a border town. Also starring Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, the film, a modest success when it opened in 1958, came to be accepted as a noir classic.

A Biblical Specialty

But the following year Mr. Heston stepped back into the world of the biblical epic, this time for the director William Wyler. The movie was “Ben-Hur.” Cast as a prince in ancient Judea who rebels against the rule of Rome, Mr. Heston again dominated the screen. In the film’s most spectacular sequence, he and his co-star, Stephen Boyd, as his Roman rival, fight a thrilling duel with whips as their horse-drawn chariots career wheel-to-wheel around an arena filled with roaring spectators.

“Ben-Hur” won 11 Academy Awards — a record at the time — including those for best picture, best director and, for Mr. Heston, best actor.

He went on to star opposite Sophia Loren in the 1961 film “El Cid,” battling the Moors in medieval Spain. As a Marine officer at the Forbidden City in 1900, he helped put down the Boxer Rebellion in Nicholas Ray’s 1963 epic “55 Days at Peking.” In “Khartoum” (1966), he played Gen. Charles (Chinese) Gordon, who was killed in a desert uprising, led in the film by Laurence Olivier’s Mahdi. When George Stevens produced and directed “The Greatest Story Ever Told” in 1965, there was Mr. Heston, back in ancient Judea, playing John the Baptist to Max von Sydow’s Jesus.

He portrayed Andrew Jackson twice, in “The President’s Lady” (1953) and “The Buccaneer” (1958). There were westerns (“Major Dundee,” “Will Penny,” “The Mountain Men”), costume dramas (“The Three Musketeers” and its sequel, “The Four Musketeers,” with Mr. Heston as the crafty Cardinal Richelieu in both) and action films aplenty. Whether playing a hard-bitten landowner in an adaptation of James Michener’s novel “The Hawaiians” (1970), or a daring pilot in “Airport 1975,” he could be relied on to give moviegoers their money’s worth.

Charlton Heston posed with his Oscar statuette after winning the 1959 Academy Award for best actor for his portrayal of Ben-Hur. Credit Associated Press

In 1965 he was cast as Michelangelo in the film version of Irving Stone’s novel “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” Directed by Carol Reed, the film pitted Mr. Heston’s temperamental artist against Rex Harrison’s testy Pope Julius II, who commissioned Michelangelo to create frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Mr. Heston’s performance took a critical drubbing, but to audiences, the larger-than-life role seemed to be another perfect fit. Mr. Heston once joked: “I have played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses. If that doesn’t create an ego problem, nothing does.”

Foray Into the Future

Mr. Heston was catapulted into the distant future in the 1968 science-fiction film “Planet of the Apes,” in which he played an astronaut marooned on a desolate planet and then enslaved by its rulers, a race of anthropomorphic apes. The film was a hit. He reprised the role two years later in the sequel, “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”

It was all a long way from Evanston, Ill., where John Charles Carter was born on Oct. 4, 1923, and from the small town of St. Helen, Mich., where his family moved when he was a small boy and where his father ran a lumber mill. He attended a one-room school and learned to fish and hunt and to savor the feeling of being self-reliant in the wild, where his shyness was no handicap.

When his parents divorced in the 1930s and his mother remarried — his stepfather’s surname was Heston — the family moved back to the Chicago suburbs, this time Winnetka. He joined the theater program at his new high school and went on to enroll at Northwestern University on a scholarship. By that time, he was convinced he had found his life’s work.

Mr. Heston also found a fellow drama student, Lydia Clarke, whom he married in 1944, after spending two years in the Aleutian Islands as a radio-gunner with the Army Air Forces. After his discharge, the Hestons moved to New York, failed to find work in the theater and, somewhat disenchanted but still determined, moved to North Carolina, where they spent less than a year working at the Thomas Wolfe memorial theater in Asheville.

When they returned to New York in 1947, Mr. Heston got his first big break, landing the role of Caesar’s lieutenant in a Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” staged by Guthrie McClintick and starring Katharine Cornell. The production ran for seven months and proved to be the high point of Mr. Heston’s New York stage career. He appeared in a handful of other plays, most of them dismal failures.

If Broadway had little to offer him, television was another matter. He made frequent appearances in dramatic series like “Robert Montgomery Presents” and “Philco Playhouse.” The door to Hollywood opened when the film producer Hal B. Wallis saw Mr. Heston’s performance as Rochester in a “Studio One” production of “Jane Eyre.” Wallis offered him a contract.

Mr. Heston made his film debut in 1950 in Wallis’s “Dark City,” a low-grade thriller in which he played a small-time gambler. Two years later, he did his first work for DeMille as a hard-driving circus boss in “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

Throughout his career he studied long and hard for his roles. He prepared for the part of Moses by memorizing passages from the Old Testament. When filming began on the sun-baked slopes of Mount Sinai, he suggested to DeMille that he play the role barefoot — a decision that he felt lent an edge of truth to his performance.

Charlton Heston as Moses in "The Ten Commandments." Credit American Movie Classics, via Associated Press

Preparing for “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” he read hundreds of Michelangelo’s letters and practiced how to sculpt and paint convincingly. When filming “The Wreck of the Mary Deare” (1959), in which he played the pilot of a salvage boat, he learned deep-water diving. And he mostly rejected stunt doubles. In “Ben-Hur,” he said, he drove his own chariot for “about 80 percent of the race.”

“I worked six weeks learning how to manage the four white horses,” he said. “Nearly pulled my arms right out of their sockets.”

As the years wore on, the leading roles began to go to younger men, and by the 1980s, Mr. Heston’s appearances on screen were less frequent. He turned to stage work again, not on Broadway but in Los Angeles, at the Ahmanson Theater, where he played roles ranging from Macbeth to James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” He also returned to television, appearing in 1983 as a paternalistic banker in the mini-series “Chiefs” and as an oil baron in the series “The Colbys.”

Mr. Heston was always able to channel some energies into the public arena. He was an active supporter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., calling him “a 20th-century Moses for his people,” and participated in the historic march on Washington in 1963.

Inspired by Reagan

He served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1966 to 1971, following in the footsteps of his friend and role model Ronald Reagan. A registered Democrat for many years, he was nevertheless selective in the candidates he chose to support and often campaigned for conservatives.

In 1981, President Reagan appointed him co-chairman of the President’s Task Force on the Arts and Humanities, a group formed to devise ways to obtain financing for arts organizations. Although he had reservations about some projects supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Heston wound up defending the agency against charges of elitism.

Recent Comments

steve

i sometimes liked to believe that Chalrton Heston was simply playing a role with the NRA, he didn't seem to know much about it and one can...

Mark

I thought he died a long time ago.

Mike Kittle

I'm struck by the hatefulness of some of the comments at Heston's death! It's not so much whether he deserves the criticism but rather the...

Again and again, he proved himself a cogent and effective speaker, but he rejected suggestions that he run for office. “I’d rather play a senator than be one,” he said.

He became a Republican after Democrats in the Senate blocked the confirmation of Judge Robert Bork, a conservative, to the Supreme Court in 1987. Mr. Heston had supported the nomination and was critical of the Reagan White House for misreading the depth of the liberal opposition.

Mr. Heston frequently spoke out against what he saw as evidence of the decline and debasement of American culture. In 1992, appalled by the lyrics on “Cop Killer,” a recording by the rap artist Ice T, he blasted the album at a Time Warner stockholders meeting and was a force in having it withdrawn from the marketplace.

Mr. Heston as Ben-Hur in 1958. Credit Associated Press

In the 1996 elections, he campaigned on behalf of some 50 Republican candidates and began to speak out against gun control. In 1997, he was elected vice president of the N.R.A.

In December of that year, as the keynote speaker at the 20th anniversary gala of the Free Congress Foundation, Mr. Heston described “a cultural war” raging across America, “storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self-confidence in who we are and what we believe.”

A Relentless Drive

The next year, in his 70’s, he was elected president of the N.R.A. In his speech at the association’s convention before his election, he trained his oratorical artillery on President Bill Clinton: “Mr. 

Clinton, sir, America didn’t trust you with our health care system. America didn’t trust you with gays in the military. America doesn’t trust you with our 21-year-old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don’t trust you with our guns.”

He was in the news again after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in April 1999, when he said that the N.R.A.’s annual membership meeting, scheduled to be held the following week in Denver, would be scaled back in light of the killings but not canceled.

In a memorable scene from “Bowling for Columbine,” a 2002 documentary about violence in America, the director, Michael Moore, visited Mr. Heston at his home and asked him how he could defend his pro-gun stance. Mr. Heston ended the interview without comment.

In May 2001, he was unanimously re-elected to an unprecedented fourth term by the association’s board of directors. The association had amended its bylaws in 2000 to allow Mr. Heston to serve a third one-year term as president. Two months after his celebrated speech at the 2000 convention, it was disclosed that he had checked himself into an alcohol rehabilitation program.

Mr. Heston was proud of his collection of some 30 guns at his longtime home in the Coldwater Canyon area of Los Angeles, where he and his wife raised their son, Fraser, and daughter, Holly Ann. They all survive him, along with three grandchildren.

Never much for socializing , he spent his days either working, exercising, reading (he was fond of biographies) or sketching. An active diarist, he published several accounts of his career, including “The Actor’s Life: Journals 1956-1976.”

In 2003, Mr. Heston was among the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by President Bush. In 1997, he was also a recipient of the annual Kennedy Center honors.

Mr. Heston continued working through the 1990s, acting more frequently on television but also in occasional films. His most recent film appearance found him playing a cameo role, in simian makeup, in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of “Planet of the Apes.”

He announced in 1999 that he was receiving radiation treatments for prostate cancer, but said he would continue his film work and go on making appearances on behalf of Republicans running for office.

He had always hated the thought of retirement and once explained his relentless drive as an actor. “You never get it right,” he said in a 1986 interview. “Never once was it the way I imagined it lying awake at 4 o’clock in the morning thinking about it the next day.” His goal remained, he said, “to get it right one time.”

Correction: April 7, 2008 

 
A front-page obituary and a headline in some editions on Sunday about the actor Charlton Heston misstated his age and the year of his birth. He was 84, not 83, and was born in 1923, not 1924.

Correction: April 9, 2008 

 
An obituary in some editions on Sunday and in some copies on Monday about the actor Charlton Heston misstated his given name at birth. It was John Charles Carter, not Charlton Carter. The obituary also referred incorrectly to the character played by Orson Welles in the film “Touch of Evil,” in which Mr. Heston had a starring role. The character, Quinlan, is a police captain, not a sheriff. And a list of Mr. Heston’s films accompanying the obituary on Monday misstated the relationship between two characters in the film “Midway,” in which Mr. Heston played a Naval officer. The characters, the officer’s son and a woman of Japanese descent, are hoping to marry; they are not already married.

Correction: April 22, 2008 

 
An obituary on April 7 and in some copies on April 6 about the actor Charlton Heston misstated the year he enlisted in the Army Air Forces, as well as other aspects of his life. He enlisted in 1942, not 1944. He served in the Aleutian Islands about two years, not three. And he and his wife, the former Lydia Clarke, an actress, spent less than one year, not several seasons, at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Theater in Asheville, N.C., which they founded after the war.

Larger Than Life: Charlton Heston

One day more than 35 years ago, I pulled into the parking lot of the massive Del Coronado hotel in San Diego when an equally massive figure walked in front of my car, blocking my view because his body filled the entire windshield. It was Charlton Heston, and he strode toward the tennis courts with a purposive authority that brought to mind Moses and Ben Hur, albeit dressed this time in shorts. This was the closest I ever got to Heston in the flesh, although, like hundred of millions of other moviegoers, I saw a great deal of him, sometimes barely clothed (“Planet of the Apes”), on the big screen.

“Big” is an appropriate word. Heston was physically imposing and he was a big movie star, someone who for several decades was the very definition of the phrase “leading man.” With his passing on April 5th, and the passing of Richard Widmark 10 days earlier , there are no leading men of a certain kind left, even as living mementos of a bygone era. John Wayne, Anthony Quinn, Rock Hudson, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, William Holden, Jimmy Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Glenn Ford, Gregory Peck. They’re all gone; the only ones still alive are Clint Eastwood, who now sits behind the camera most of the time, and Kirk Douglas, in his 90s and slowed down by a stroke.

What all these fallen stars (with the exception of Widmark) shared was a physicality that radiated energy and demanded attention. They were “compelling screen presences,” in part because they literally filled the screen, just as Heston filled the smaller screen of my windshield. (Lancaster often acted with his back to the camera; power emanated from it; his back was the expressive counterpart of Douglas’s chest, which was bared in almost every movie he made.) It was no accident that all these guys were identified (some more than others) with the western, a genre that foregrounds the glories and trials of masculinity as they are captured in a line from Louis L’Amour’s “Heller With a Gun” (1955): “It was a hard land and it bred hard men to hard ways.”

But Heston wasn’t hard (many have testified to how genuinely nice he was), and it showed in his best performances. The fact is that Heston’s size, his monumentality, was an obstacle he had to overcome in order to become the actor he wanted to be. When you saw him it was all too easy to agree with Pauline Kael’s summary assessment: “With his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body, Heston is a god-like hero; built for strength, he is an archetype of what makes Americans win.” Mike LaSalle, film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, remarked just after the star’s death, “By size, disposition and worldview, Heston was incapable of playing a small man.”

But that’s not right. Not only was Heston capable of playing a small man; the tension between the inner smallness he was portraying and his physical mass added strength and poignancy to the performance. A good example is the 1958 movie “The Big Country,” a powerful western directed by William Wyler (who would direct Heston in “Ben Hur” the next year and who was the director of the best American movie ever made, “The Best Years of our Lives”).

“The Big Country” is a really big movie in every way — scope, landscape, music, performances and bodies. Heston’s co-actors include Gregory Peck, Charles Bickford, Chuck Connors and Burl Ives, each a large man exuding power. In this company, Heston is at best the sixth lead (although he got fourth billing), behind Peck, Bickford, Ives and the two female stars, Carroll Baker and Jean Simmons. The key to his role is that he is not his own man. His character is in love with his boss’s daughter (Baker) and he hopes that his loyal service to “the Major” (Bickford) will someday be rewarded by a piece of the ranch. These aspirations are upset by the arrival of Peck as the daughter’s successful suitor. A retired sea-captain entirely out of water, the Peck character nevertheless navigates quite confidently in his new surroundings. Even when he makes mistakes, and he makes more than a few, he always displays an inner ease in contrast to Heston’s Leech, who is anxious, ambitious, jealous and frustrated.

The plot gives Leech an opportunity to redeem himself, or rather to be himself, and he almost takes it but doesn’t. The Major is about to storm the ranch house of his hated rival, played by Ives (they are feuding over a water source called, what else, the Big Muddy), and set off a battle that can only end with the death of almost everyone. Leech sees the folly of the enterprise, and tells the Major that for the first time he cannot stand with him. But when the Major starts out on his own, Leech simply cannot abandon him, and he joins him riding down the canyon to the rousing cadences of one of the best movie scores ever written. In a more conventional western, this would have come across as an act of heroism (going down with your friend despite the odds), but “The Big Country” is an attack on the code of the West, and Leech here displays his inability to break free of it. Heston is magnificent in his willingness to be small, a man of great outward strength who cannot summon the inner strength to break free of his subservience to another. (It is a tribute to his performance that Bosley Crowther’s review in this newspaper barely mentioned him.)

What “The Big Country” demonstrates is that Heston was really a character actor in a leading man’s body, and that his basic character was not Moses or Ben Hur or El Cid but the weak and flawed inhabitant of a physical frame he could not live up to. In some of his finest films, he plays that role even when he is the leading man. “Will Penny” (Heston’s favorite among his own movies) is the best example. He plays the title character, an illiterate, limited cow hand who just tries to hang on over the winter, and has no future. A future opens up to him in the form a woman and her son, but (like Leech) he can’t take it because he knows that he’s not up to it, or to much of anything else. In the end he rides away, not in the splendid isolation that marks the exit of the classic western hero who has cleaned up the town or saved the valley, but just in isolation. A reviewer at Reel.com draws the right moral: “Heston so often required to play larger than life characters delivers a sublime performance in a role that is the exact opposite.”

He does it again in “Soylent Green” (1973), a film graced by the great Edward G. Robinson’s final performance as on old man ready to die. (Robinson died nine days after the film was completed.)

The time is a future in which overpopulation and environmental disaster have led to a dystopia ruled over by the mysterious Soylent Corporation, which distributes a food source of questionable origin. Heston plays Thorn, a police detective investigating the death of a member of the board with the help of researcher Sol Roth (Robinson). He is bitter, venal, exploitative and thoroughly unattractive, but as he pursues his investigation despite the attempts of his superiors to close it down, he grows into someone who is ready to risk his life in order to bear witness to the terrible truth of a society that is literally eating itself (“Soylent green is people”). Thorn is a reluctant protagonist, again a small man in a body too big for him. Reviewer Tamara Hladick, writing for Scifi.com, calls him a “dubious, ambiguous hero” and names Robinson’s Roth, a big man in a small body, the film’s “conscience and soul.”

The conscience (in a weird sense) and soul of “Touch of Evil” is Orson Welles’s Hank Quinlan, a very big man in a very big body whose zeal for justice had led him to acts of corruption including murder. Heston plays Mike Vargas, a Mexican policeman no less self-righteous than Quinlan, but much less effective. He runs around a lot and manages to place his sexy new wife (Janet Leigh) in danger while repeatedly misreading the situation he has gotten himself into. In the end, Quinlan dies because his trusted assistant tricks him into a confession, an act not of betrayal but (he explains) of fidelity to the lessons his mentor has taught him. Vargas is technically victorious; he brings down the bad guy and gets to ride out of town with Janet Leigh; but the camera lingers on the fallen bulk of Quinlan who, even in death, receives a famous tribute from Marlene Dietrich: “He was some kind of man.” Vargas may be a man some day, but not in this movie. He just looks the part. Quinlan, barely able to move and spectacularly unattractive, is the real thing. Once again, Heston uses his movie-star profile and body as foils to set off something more substantial. It is a performance of great generosity as he yields the spotlight to the actor/director he so much admired.

It was a generosity he displayed off-screen as well as on. He supported Welles in his battles against the studio as he would later support Sam Peckinpah, to the extent of forfeiting his salary when the famously erratic director’s funding was cut off because of cost overruns incurred in the filming of “Major Dundee” (1965). He stood and marched with Martin Luther King. He lobbied for the National Endowment for the Arts despite disliking some of the projects it funded. He served as the president of the Screen Actors Guild and was chairman of the American Film Institute. He was active in politics, first as a liberal democrat, before following his friend Ronald Reagan down the path of conservatism. Again like Reagan, he announced to the public that he was suffering form what appeared to be an early stage of Alzheimer’s disease, ending his announcement with these famous lines from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”: “We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep.” When he went to his final sleep, his wife of 64 years was by his bedside.

And, oh yes, he was a passionate (some said fanatic) advocate of gun rights and the president of the National Rifle Association. Many on the other side of this controversy were unable to forgive him for what they considered a moral as well as a political failing, and they vilified both the man and the career. They were wrong to do so. He was some kind of man.

Whether He's Talking Movies or Politics, Charlton Heston Is a Straight Shooter

In the beginning, there was the jaw, and the jaw was tight. It was a chiseled jaw in the marble landscape of a face, and the mouth was not the kind for kissing, but for barking commandments in the clearest possible diction, each word given its own space and time, and woe be unto those unbelievers who would worship the golden calf when he came down from the mountain and laid down the law of the land.

Because Moses was not a man -- or Charlton Heston an actor -- to mumble his lines. Or to monkey with.

In the mind's eye, the iconic roles of Heston's career were figures of absolute authority: Ben-Hur and El Cid, Charles Gordon of Khartoum, Moses and Capt. Taylor marooned on a planet populated by talking apes. Bigger-than-life men, men of intestinal fortitude, tested by the fates, standing ramrod-straight, leading with their jaw, entering the arena to do battle, no quarter asked or given.

Also, Heston became famous -- or infamous -- for his politics, particularly his role in later years as the front man for the National Rifle Association and his belief that the Bill of Rights is built upon the bedrock of the Second Amendment. You would take away Chuck Heston's right to bear arms at your own peril.

And so these may be reasonable images to pass through the mind as one ascends Coldwater Canyon to visit Heston at his hilltop lair, which he calls, simply, the Ridge. He holds the high ground.

One is aware that in his 1995 autobiography, "In the Arena," Heston offered his thoughts on the importance of well-defended perimeter.

"Most people in the film community are unfamiliar with firearms and many oppose them, some quite virulently," Heston wrote. "During the L.A. riots in 1992, a good many of these folk suffered a change of heart. As smoke from burning buildings smudged the skyline and the TV news showed vivid images of laughing looters smashing windows and carting off boomboxes and booze, I got a few phone calls from firmly anti-gun friends in clear conflict. 'Umm, Chuck, you have quite a few . . . ah, guns, don't you?'

" 'Yes, I do.'

" 'Shotguns and . . . like that?'

" 'Indeed.'

" 'Could you lend me one for a day or so? I tried to buy one, but they have this waiting period . . . ' "

This waiting period, indeed.

Heston concludes the lesson with the warning to looters eyeing his boomboxes and booze. "Our only neighbors on our ridge are the Isaacs. Between us, Billy and I must own at least 40 firearms of various types. We would resist with deadly force any assault on our homes or those who live in them."

Because Charlton Heston holds the high ground.

And so on a warm, sunny morning, as the visitor pulls into the drive, a figure appears behind the window and watches. It is Heston himself. He steps out, extends a handshake of medium-strength grip and leads the way inside. The jaw is still there and the eyes are bright and clear. For Heston is now 74 years old and has recently had hip surgery, the bane of the aged, and so moves stiffly into the living room, wearing nylon sweat pants that make a shushing sound, and on his feet are thick white socks and a pair of cheap black Chinese slippers, and he is shuffling. Time passes for all, and Chuck Heston's days of chariot racing are behind him.

"I have played formidable authority figures," he begins, his voice still bass, still resonating with an oaken-cask profundo. "Characters not easy to get along with. Kings and warriors and cowboys and cops and astronauts, and, of course, Moses. None of these men you want to cross."

Indeed. A few years ago, Heston returned to the screen in a cameo role for director James Cameron in Arnold Schwarzenegger's "True Lies," in which Heston played, complete with a pirate's eye patch, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He explains: "Cameron said that I was the only actor who could plausibly intimidate Arnold." He knows that he has that power, and the trademark of grit appears to please him. It has clearly provided him with his life's work.

"It is my physical equipment," he says. "I was once asked why there weren't as many tall actors today and I have to say that stumped me. There aren't."

Heston had the height and jawbone, and the voice that is almost as recognizable as a signature. Throughout his career, Heston has done Shakespeare "because that is what I believe actors should do." It shows in his acting.

While other actors, in his time and later, pursued a more naturalistic style of acting, Heston's work is classical and theatrical -- and physical. He says it is a matter of pride that he learned to fight with broadswords, and ride horses and camels, and to race a chariot, as he did in "Ben-Hur," probably his most memorable role next to Moses.

Modern audiences today who rent his long-running videos on rainy weekends might find his acting in the epics a bit stiff and dated, but oddly comforting. In a contemporary culture, riven by crosscurrents fuzzing the lines of good and evil, Charlton Heston is the crossing guard.

In interviews and his autobiography, Heston is generous about the work of others and humble about his own. "I have done some great scenes," he says. "I have had some great parts. There was some good work and some not-so-good work, there were failed films and a few fine ones. As for my work, I will leave that to others."

He is, though, unhappy about certain trends in modern cinema and American life. "There are fewer giant figures today," he says. "The excitement in the movies is largely digital. There is nothing much really to act. The actors could be replaced by holograms, could become special effects themselves."

As Heston reclines on a couch in his living room, his fingers fidget with his shirt buttons and tug at the upholstery piping, distracted.

"I am not Moses," he says at one point. But how to reconcile the man and the actor?

Most of his early boyhood, until the age of 10, was spent in the Michigan woods. In his autobiography, Heston writes of hunting and helping put meat in the stew pot. But he admits it was only a few rabbits, at most, and that he spent more time in the forest around his home, pretending to be other people, Huck Finn or Davy Crockett.

His parents were divorced when he was young -- a traumatic event, and a shame to him that he never spoke of at the time. He and his mother moved about until she remarried and the family moved to Wilmette, a Chicago North Shore suburb. In high school, he was not skilled enough to play team sports, so he joined the rifle team and the chess club, but dropped them when he discovered a love of the stage.

It was Drama Club for young Chuck. He was a shy boy and he says the shyness has been with him for a lifetime. He was never adopted by his mother's second husband, Chet Heston, but he took his name. "It is possible," he writes, "that I'm a loner because I'm an actor. An actor at work is giving you somebody else. He's not performing to you; you're watching him be another man. In my case, it's often a real historical figure, a far better man than I am myself."

The Winnetka Community Theater awarded him a scholarship to Northwestern University to study acting, but his training was interrupted by World War II. He joined the Navy. He served his time in a lonely outpost in the Aleutian Islands. He did not fire a shot in anger. As he put it: "I attended World War II."

He married his wife, Lydia, also an actor, and their marriage continues more than 50 years later.

Heston's political activities began with leadership of a union, the Screen Actors Guild. He voted Democratic, for Kennedy and Johnson, and, as many of the current critics of his politics may not recall, he was an early supporter of civil rights and marched in Washington, in the full flower of his celebrity after his roles as Moses and Ben-Hur, with Martin Luther King Jr.

But Heston was, even then, turning to the right. He recalls, while filming "War Lord," being driven from location to hotel and passing a large billboard with a portrait of Barry Goldwater and a sea of blue and the words: "In your heart, you know he's right."

"Yeah," Heston says now, talking on the Ridge. "that was Saint Paul on the road to Damascus." An epiphany. The turning of the screw.

"Dear God, what a sorry road we've slid down since then," Heston believes. The slide? In his book, the actor-activist rails.

Oliver Stone "attacking the core elements of society."

Political correctness run amok.

"Affirmative action is a stain on the American soul."

Quentin Tarantino's philosopher-assassins.

Ice-T rapping about cop killing.

And overpopulation of the planet, an issue that forms the central idea of his one "message movie," the 1973 chiller with one of his most memorable lines: "Soylent Green . . . is people."

"Our borders are awash in immigrants," he writes, "a large proportion of them illegal, but all nonetheless qualified for the fruits of our welfare state, entitled to generous benefits, including not only voting in our elections on ballots in the language of their choice, but the education of their progeny in that language."

On another page, he relates, "A columnist described the childhood of a welfare kid with brutal honesty: first felony arrest at fourteen, becomes an absent parent at sixteen, out of school at seventeen if he gets that far, with a diploma he can't read."

A society unraveling? A planet of the apes? The man who played Moses is honestly, deeply concerned. "In a staggering number of Hollywood films of the past 20 years, the villains are authority figures in American society," he says.

Charlton Heston, for his 20 years in the arena, was the authority figure in American epic films. There was right and wrong. Good and evil. Honor and cowardice. Heston died for something in his movies. Moses did not reach the promised land. El Cid died of his wounds, but was propped upon his stallion's back, dead, to lead his men into glorious battle against the invading Moors in Spain.

The world is now more of a muddle.

After an hour or so, it is time to leave the Ridge. The road to his house is being rebuilt, and the workers and their equipment are crowding the front drive, but Heston comes out and waves his arm, directing traffic, bringing order, parting the waves, and then he limps back into the house and, in the rearview mirror, closes the door.

Charlton Heston Gets a Postage Stamp

At a ceremony in Hollywood, those who knew him said the star of "Ben Hur" and the original "Planet of the Apes" was unafraid of stirring political controversy.

Charlton Heston, the movie star, political activist and former head of the National Rifle Association, got his own postage stamp on Friday, unveiled at a ceremony at the historic Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

The stamp bearing Heston's image is a painting taken from a photo shot by his widow, Lydia Clarke Heston, who attended Friday's ceremony, which was part of the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood.

The Heston stamp is three years in the making and began with lobbying from Michael Levine, the actor's publicist of 21 years.

Heston is the 18th stamp in the Legends of Hollywood series from the U.S. Postal Service. Earlier ones included John Wayne, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper and Lucille Ball.

The ceremony, which preceded the worldwide premiere of the newly restored 1958 Heston film Touch of Evil, included remarks from representatives of the postal service as well as members of SAG-AFTRA. Heston was president of that organization's precursor, the Screen Actors Guild, from 1965 to 1971.

The speakers, who included son Fraser Clarke Heston, a filmmaker who directed his father in the 1990 TNT movie Treasure Island, noted that Heston's political activism was sometimes controversial.

Several reminisced about Heston picketing against segregation in 1961 and marching with Dr.Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963, when it took courage to do so, and remarked about his passionate support of the NRA.

"Heston fundamentally embodied a commitment to fight for what he valued -- no matter where or when he was needed," said Ned Vaughn, the founding executive vp of SAG-AFTRA. "Later in his life, some of those fights would earn him contempt from some of his colleagues in the entertainment industry. Becoming a Republican and giving his unwavering support to the work of his good friend Ronald Reagan. Giving compelling voice to his concerns about political correctness and cultural decline in our society, and, of course, fighting to protect the Second Amendment."

The event, hosted by TCM's Ben Mankiewicz, also included a video montage of Heston's work, with clips from Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments and the original Planet of the Apes.

After the montage, Fraser Clarke Heston told how his dad learned to drive a four-horse chariot for his Oscar-winning role in Ben Hur. When he worried he wasn't good enough to realistically race against several other teams in the arena, stunt director Yakima Canutt told him: "Chuck, you just make sure you stay in the chariot. I guarantee you're gonna win the damn race."

After the event, Levine told The Hollywood Reporter that when he launched his effort to put Heston's image on a stamp at a press conference three years ago, only one prominent person showed up: conservative political commentator Bruce Herschensohn.

"For the first two years, it wasn't easy and it wasn't popular. My sense is because of his work with the NRA," Levine said.

The effort gained steam about a year ago through a public petition and some friendly media, particularly from Christopher Ruddy and his Newsmax magazine, Levine said.

"Heston was an extraordinary guy, not just an extraordinary actor. He was a very unique man," Levine said.

Charlton Heston Dies at Beverly Hills Home

Charlton Heston, who won the 1959 best actor Oscar as the chariot-racing "Ben-Hur" and portrayed Moses, Michelangelo, El Cid and other heroic figures in movie epics of the '50s and '60s, has died. He was 84.

The actor died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills with his wife Lydia at his side, family spokesman Bill Powers said.

Powers declined to comment on the cause of death or provide further details.

"Charlton Heston was seen by the world as larger than life. He was known for his chiseled jaw, broad shoulders and resonating voice, and, of course, for the roles he played," Heston's family said in a statement. "No one could ask for a fuller life than his. No man could have given more to his family, to his profession, and to his country."

Heston revealed in 2002 that he had symptoms consistent with Alzheimer's disease, saying, "I must reconcile courage and surrender in equal measure."

With his large, muscular build, well-boned face and sonorous voice, Heston proved the ideal star during the period when Hollywood was filling movie screens with panoramas depicting the religious and historical past. "I have a face that belongs in another century," he often remarked.

The actor assumed the role of leader offscreen as well. He served as president of the Screen Actors Guild and chairman of the American Film Institute and marched in the civil rights movement of the 1950s. With age, he grew more conservative and campaigned for conservative candidates.

In June 1998, Heston was elected president of the National Rifle Association, for which he had posed for ads holding a rifle. He delivered a jab at then-President Clinton, saying, "America doesn't trust you with our 21-year-old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don't trust you with our guns."

Heston stepped down as NRA president in April 2003, telling members his five years in office were "quite a ride. ... I loved every minute of it."

Later that year, Heston was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. "The largeness of character that comes across the screen has also been seen throughout his life," President Bush said at the time.

He engaged in a lengthy feud with liberal Ed Asner during the latter's tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild. His latter-day activism almost overshadowed his achievements as an actor, which were considerable.

Heston lent his strong presence to some of the most acclaimed and successful films of the midcentury. "Ben-Hur" won 11 Academy Awards, tying it for the record with the more recent "Titanic" (1997) and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" (2003). Heston's other hits include: "The Ten Commandments," "El Cid," "55 Days at Peking," "Planet of the Apes" and "Earthquake."

He liked to the cite the number of historical figures he had portrayed:

Andrew Jackson ("The President's Lady," "The Buccaneer"), Moses ("The Ten Commandments"), title role of "El Cid," John the Baptist ("The Greatest Story Ever Told"), Michelangelo ("The Agony and the Ecstasy"), General Gordon ("Khartoum"), Marc Antony ("Julius Caesar," "Antony and Cleopatra"), Cardinal Richelieu ("The Three Musketeers"), Henry VIII ("The Prince and the Pauper").

Heston made his movie debut in the 1940s in two independent films by a college classmate, David Bradley, who later became a noted film archivist. He had the title role in "Peer Gynt" in 1942 and was Marc Antony in Bradley's 1949 version of "Julius Caesar," for which Heston was paid $50 a week.

Film producer Hal B. Wallis ("Casablanca") spotted Heston in a 1950 television production of "Wuthering Heights" and offered him a contract. When his wife reminded him that they had decided to pursue theater and television, he replied, "Well, maybe just for one film to see what it's like."

Heston earned star billing from his first Hollywood movie, "Dark City," a 1950 film noir. Cecil B. DeMille next cast him as the circus manager in the all-star "The Greatest Show On Earth," named by the Motion Picture Academy as the best picture of 1952. More movies followed:

"The Savage," "Ruby Gentry," "The President's Lady," "Pony Express" (as Buffalo Bill Cody), "Arrowhead," "Bad for Each Other," "The Naked Jungle," "Secret of the Incas," "The Far Horizons" (as Clark of the Lewis and Clark trek), "The Private War of Major Benson," "Lucy Gallant."

Most were forgettable low-budget films, and Heston seemed destined to remain an undistinguished action star. His old boss DeMille rescued him.

The director had long planned a new version of "The Ten Commandments," which he had made as a silent in 1923 with a radically different approach that combined biblical and modern stories. He was struck by Heston's facial resemblance to Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses, especially the similar broken nose, and put the actor through a long series of tests before giving him the role.

The Hestons' newborn, Fraser Clarke Heston, played the role of the infant Moses in the film.

More films followed: the eccentric thriller "Touch of Evil," directed by Orson Welles; William Wyler's "The Big Country," costarring with Gregory Peck; a sea saga, "The Wreck of the Mary Deare" with Gary Cooper.

Then his greatest role: "Ben-Hur."

Heston wasn't the first to be considered for the remake of 1925 biblical epic. Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster and Rock Hudson had declined the film. Heston plunged into the role, rehearsing two months for the furious chariot race.

He railed at suggestions the race had been shot with a double: "I couldn't drive it well, but that wasn't necessary. All I had to do was stay on board so they could shoot me there. I didn't have to worry; MGM guaranteed I would win the race."

The huge success of "Ben-Hur" and Heston's Oscar made him one of the highest-paid stars in Hollywood. He combined big-screen epics like "El Cid" and "55 Days at Peking" with lesser ones such as "Diamond Head," "Will Penny" and "Airport 1975." In his later years he played cameos in such films as "Wayne's World 2" and "Tombstone."

He often returned to the theater, appearing in such plays as "A Long Day's Journey into Night" and "A Man for All Seasons." He starred as a tycoon in the prime-time soap opera, "The Colbys," a two-season spinoff of "Dynasty."

At his birth in a Chicago suburb on Oct. 4, 1923, his name was Charles Carter. His parents moved to St. Helen, Mich., where his father, Russell Carter, operated a lumber mill. Growing up in the Michigan woods with almost no playmates, young Charles read books of adventure and devised his own games while wandering the countryside with his rifle.

Charles's parents divorced, and she married Chester Heston, a factory plant superintendent in Wilmette, Ill., an upscale north Chicago suburb. Shy and feeling displaced in the big city, the boy had trouble adjusting to the new high school. He took refuge in the drama department.

"What acting offered me was the chance to be many other people," he said in a 1986 interview. "In those days I wasn't satisfied with being me."

Calling himself Charlton Heston from his mother's maiden name and his stepfather's last name, he won an acting scholarship to Northwestern University in 1941. He excelled in campus plays and appeared on Chicago radio. In 1943, he enlisted in the Army Air Force and served as a radio-gunner in the Aleutians.

In 1944 he married another Northwestern drama student, Lydia Clarke, and after his army discharge in 1947, they moved to New York to seek acting jobs. Finding none, they hired on as codirectors and principal actors at a summer theater in Asheville, N.C.

Back in New York, both Hestons began finding work. With his strong 6-feet-2 build and craggily handsome face, Heston won roles in TV soap operas, plays ("Antony and Cleopatra" with Katherine Cornell) and live TV dramas such as "Julius Caesar," "Macbeth," "The Taming of the Shrew" and "Of Human Bondage."

Heston wrote several books: "The Actor's Life: Journals 1956-1976," published in 1978; "Beijing Diary: 1990," concerning his direction of the play "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial" in Chinese; "In the Arena: An Autobiography," 1995; and "Charlton Heston's Hollywood: 50 Years of American Filmmaking," 1998.

Besides Fraser, who directed his father in an adventure film, "Mother Lode," the Hestons had a daughter, Holly Ann, born Aug. 2, 1961. The couple celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in 1994 at a party with Hollywood and political friends. They had been married 64 years when he died.

In late years, Heston drew as much publicity for his crusades as for his performances. In addition to his NRA work, he campaigned for Republican presidential and congressional candidates and against affirmative action.

He resigned from Actors Equity, claiming the union's refusal to allow a white actor to play a Eurasian role in "Miss Saigon" was "obscenely racist." He attacked CNN's telecasts from Baghdad as "sowing doubts" about the allied effort in the 1990-91 Gulf War.

At a Time Warner stockholders meeting, he castigated the company for releasing an Ice-T album that purportedly encouraged cop killing.

Heston wrote in "In the Arena" that he was proud of what he did "though now I'll surely never be offered another film by Warners, nor get a good review in Time. On the other hand, I doubt I'll get a traffic ticket very soon."

Charlton Heston, 1923-2008: An Actor Famous for Playing Heroic Roles

I'm Shirley Griffith. And I'm Barbara Klein with PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English. Today we tell about actor Charlton Heston. He is best known for playing powerful and heroic leaders in movies such as "The Ten Commandments" and "Ben-Hur." Heston had a strong face and body that could express great physical and emotional force.

Heston made about one hundred movies during his sixty-year career.  He was also known for his social and political activism.

Charlton Heston was born John Carter in nineteen twenty-three in Evanston, Illinois. He spent his early childhood in Saint Helen, Michigan. His parents ended their marriage when he was a boy. Later, he decided to change his name. He took the last name of his mother's second husband, Heston. And, for his first name he used his mother's former last name, Charlton.

Charlton Heston discovered his interest in acting while performing in plays at his high school. He later spent two years studying theater at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. But he left college to join the Army Air Forces during World War Two. In nineteen forty-four he married a college classmate, Lydia Clarke.

The young couple moved to New York City after the war. They tried to find acting jobs. Heston found small roles in the theater as well as in television shows. His performance in a television version of the book "Jane Eyre" caught the attention of the Hollywood producer Hal B. Wallis.

Wallis gave Heston a role in the movie "Dark City," which came out in nineteen fifty. The actor soon found other roles in movies including "The Greatest Show on Earth" directed by Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille later asked Heston to play the role of Moses in his movie "The Ten Commandments" which came out in nineteen fifty-six.  Heston played the Egyptian prince who learns his true identity and leads the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt to the promised land.  This role made Heston famous and defined his career as a hero and leader.  "The Ten Commandments" was long, very costly and had many special effects.

In nineteen fifty-eight Heston starred in "Touch of Evil."  He played a Mexican drug investigator.  Orson Welles also had an acting role in this film.  Heston persuaded Universal Studios to hire Welles to direct the movie. "Touch of Evil" has since become a great example of the kind of crime movie known as "film noir."

The nineteen fifty-nine movie "Ben-Hur" made Charlton Heston an even bigger star. He played a Jewish man named Judah Ben-Hur who is imprisoned unjustly and rebels against the rule of Rome in ancient Judea.  The movie is most famous for a long scene in which Ben-Hur competes in an exciting chariot race against a Roman commander he considers his enemy. Recreating such a large event on film required a great amount of money and technical skill.

Many actors would have used a professional stunt man to carry out such a dangerous activity as a chariot race. But Charlton Heston did much of the work himself. He trained for weeks to learn how to skillfully lead a team of speeding horses.

After Ben-Hur wins the chariot race, he speaks with Esther, the woman he loves. She wants him to forget about his hatred towards the Roman government in power.

ESTHER: Oh Judah, rest, sleep. For a few hours of the night, let your mind be at peace.

JUDAH: Peace? Love and peace! Do you think I don't long for them as much as you do? Where did you see them?

ESTHER: If you had heard this man from Nazareth…

Esther tells Judah about having listened to the teachings of the prophet Jesus.

JUDAH: Children of God? In that dead valley where we left them? I tell you every man in Judea is unclean and will stay unclean until we've scoured off our bodies the crust and filth of being at the mercy of tyranny. No other life is possible except to wash this land clean.

ESTHER: In blood?

JUDAH: Yes, in blood!

At the time, "Ben-Hur" was one of the most costly and complex movies ever made. It cost MGM Studios fifteen million dollars to produce. The popularity of the movie alone helped improve the financial situation of the studio. "Ben-Hur" won eleven Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Charlton Heston.

In the nineteen fifties and sixties, many actors used "Method acting" to produce a believable performance. Actors like Marlon Brando would explore their personal emotions and experiences to create a realistic character. Charlton Heston chose instead to use objects in real life to build a character. For example, he would think about the way his character looked and what clothes the character would wear.

Heston studied intensely to understand his characters. For example, in the movie "The Agony and the Ecstasy" Heston played the role of the sixteenth century Italian artist Michelangelo. Heston learned how to paint and sculpt so that he could realistically imitate the artist's actions. He also studied the hundreds of letters written by Michelangelo to more fully understand the artist's personality.

Heston starred in many adventure movies during the nineteen sixties.  His face and body represented strength, manliness and heroism in many different roles. He played cowboys, soldiers, athletes. His movies included "El Cid", "Khartoum", and "The Greatest Story Ever Told."  In the science fiction film "Planet of the Apes" he played an astronaut who is enslaved by a society of intelligent and powerful non-human rulers.

GEORGE TAYLOR: Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!

In the nineteen seventies, Heston appeared in popular disaster movies like "Earthquake," "Skyjacked" and "Airport 1975."  Charlton Heston once said that over his career he played three presidents, three holy men and two artistic geniuses. He joked that if that did not make a person feel self-important then nothing would.

Throughout his life, Charlton Heston was active in social and political causes. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, he worked to defend civil rights. In nineteen sixty-three he helped gather artists to participate in the March on Washington, D.C. to demand racial equality. It was at this historic event that the civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.  Mr. Heston was a very public supporter of Dr. King.

Charlton Heston was also very active in the movie industry. He was president of the Screen Actors Guild for six years starting in nineteen sixty-five.  He also worked to help establish the American Film Institute. In nineteen seventy-seven he was honored for his service in the industry. He received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

He later received other awards for his lifetime of work.  In nineteen ninety-seven he was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor. And, in two thousand three, President Bush gave Charlton Heston a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Later in his life, Heston became more socially and politically conservative. He supported Republican Party politicians.  And he became known for actively opposing laws to control the private ownership of guns.  In nineteen ninety-eight Heston was elected president of the National Rifle Association. This organization works to oppose gun control laws. It considers the right to own a gun an important civil right guaranteed by the United States Constitution.

Charlton Heston became famous for a speech he gave for the N.R.A. in two thousand. He held up a large rifle used in the seventeen hundreds.  He said the only way the government could take away his gun was from his "cold, dead hands." Heston wrote about his opinions in books including "In the Arena" and "To Be a Man: Letters to My Grandson."

In two thousand, Charlton Heston issued a statement announcing that he had a nerve disorder whose signs were like Alzheimer's disease.  He died in two thousand eight at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was eighty-four years old.  The memory of Charlton Heston will live on in the powerful heroes he brought to life in his movies. His style of acting and the movies he made represent a special period in the history of Hollywood.

This program was written and produced by Dana Demange. I'm Shirley Griffith. And I'm Barbara Klein. Join us again next week for PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English.