He played Moses and Michelangelo, but Americans under 40 are more likely to know Charlton Heston as the conservative activist who walked out on filmmaker Michael Moore.
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Heston, who died Saturday night at the age of 84, was once the best-paid actor in Hollywood thanks to his iconic roles in films such as Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments. After making Planet of the Apes in 1968 and The Omega Man in 1971, however, his acting career went into decline even as he gained prominence on the political stage.
Those who recall him as president of the National Rifle Association may be surprised that Heston started out as a liberal Democrat. He campaigned for Adlai Stevenson in 1956 and John F. Kennedy in 1960. He opposed Hollywood censors’ attempts to prettify the language in Ben-Hur. He supported a gun control law, passed under President Lyndon Johnson, that forbade addicts and federal convicts from owning guns, and regulated interstate commerce in firearms
He was also a leading advocate of civil rights, raising money for the cause and joining Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington in 1963 along with Harry Belafonte, Jackie Robinson, Paul Newman, Josephine Baker and Bob Dylan—none of whom can be imagined as a conservative. Two years earlier, he had picketed a segregated theater in Oklahoma that was showing one of his movies.
“We certainly disagree with his position as NRA head and also his firm, firm, unwavering support of the unlimited right to bear arms,” said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Round Table, a civil rights group. “Charlton Heston was a complex individual. He lived a long time, and certainly, there were many phases. The phases we prefer to remember were certainly his contributions to Dr. King and civil rights.”
As he got older, however, Heston’s politics swung rightward. He seemed to follow the lead of Ronald Reagan, who had preceded him as president of the Screen Actors Guild (”Ronald Reagan was my president before he was yours,” Heston once wrote) and also as a liberal Democrat. Heston campaigned for Reagan and for both Bushes when they ran for president.
In a 1997 speech, he deplored a culture war being waged against “the God fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle-class Protestant–or even worse, evangelical Christian, Midwestern or Southern—or even worse, rural, apparently straight–or even worse, admitted heterosexuals, gun-owning-or even worse, NRA-card-carrying, average working stiff–or even worse, male working stiff–because, not only don’t you count, you are a downright obstacle to social progress.”
He resigned from Actors Equity, calling the union’s refusal to allow a white actor to play the part of a Eurasian in “Miss Saigon” “obscenely racist.” By then, he also opposed affirmative action and criticized CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War as sympathetic to the Iraqis.
A staunch defender of the Second Amendment, Heston was elected president of the N.R.A. in 1998. “Those wise old dead white guys that invented this country knew what they were talking about,” he said.
Perhaps his most famous moment at the organization came at its 2000 convention where, 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 flintlock above his head and shouted, “From my cold, dead hands!”
Michael Moore visited Heston to talk to him for the 2002 anti-gun documentary, Bowling for Columbine, But Heston appeared angry and flustered by Moore’s questions and walked out on the interview. Moore, who was criticized by some for “ambushing” Heston, posted a picture of the actor on his web site after he died.
In 2002, Heston was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. “If you see a little less spring in my step, if your name fails to leap to my lips, you’ll know why,” he said in announcing his condition. “And if I tell you a funny story for the second time, please laugh anyway.” He withdrew from public life, resigning from the NRA in 2003, although he accepted a Medal of Freedom later that year from President George W. Bush.
“The largeness of character that comes across the screen has also been seen throughout his life,” Bush said.
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