Heston’s legacies in cinema and civics

Charlton Heston was the exception.

For conservatives and patriots wary of Hollywood’s liberal agendas, the actor was reassurance that some cinematic idols were in touch with America’s traditional values. Larger than life and ruggedly handsome, Mr. Heston was an actor’s actor, his craft honed as bright and sharp as a sword edge.

He died late Saturday night after years of battling Alzheimer’s-like symptoms. He was 84.

His dedication to conservative causes, including leadership of the National Rifle Association (NRA) from 1998 to 2003, earned him a political profile in his later years that was as large as his acting stardom, playing such religious roles as Moses, John the Baptist and Ben-Hur.

Things changed in his life, Mr. Heston once said, “when I exchanged a set of stone tablets for a shotgun.”

He campaigned for his friend Ronald Reagan, wrote for National Review and publicly berated the Time Warner board over violent music.

One of the most famous images from late in his life came at an NRA convention, when he stood at a podium brandishing an antique rifle above his head and said gun-control advocates would have to pry it “from my cold, dead hands.”

The NRA’s current president, Wayne La Pierre, called him a “great patriot” yesterday — just one of the accolades that came in from conservatives, including President Bush, Nancy Reagan and John McCain.

Mr. Heston’s work spanned some 100 films over six decades. In addition to his religious characters in the 1950s and early ‘60s, he played such historic parts as El Cid, Michelangelo, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson in glorious Technicolor for a post-war nation eager for heroes.

Film historian David Thomson noted that he “had the gravitas to play God and God-like figures, which you don’t have among today’s actors.”

His ardent portrayal of Col. George Taylor in 1968’s “Planet of the Apes,” an astronaut discovering a humanity enslaved by apes, won him another string of roles in science-fiction and futuristic spectaculars and a new generation of fans for such films as “Soylent Green,” “The Omega Man” and “Earthquake.”

His legendary exclamations include: “It’s people!” and “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!”

Civic duty

Mr. Heston served as six-term president of the Screen Actors Guild and chairman of the American Film Institute. Offended by racial discrimination, he accompanied Martin Luther King in the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights.

His appreciation of bedrock American values caused Mr. Heston, a B-25 gunner in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II, to take on the culture wars, protesting the debasement of everyday families in popular culture and deriding political correctness.

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