Quotes of the Day

God is dead. Charlton Heston, the man-deity of movies, passed away yesterday in Los Angeles at 83.

Heston didn't just play great roles, he imposingly, thrillingly embodied them. Moses (in The Ten Commandments), Michelangelo (The Agony and the Ecstasy), Rodrigo Diaz (El Cid), Judah Ben-Hur in the Godzilla of Biblical epics: he slipped into these outsize figures as if into a second skin, stamped his strong visage on theirs. He also, actually, did play God once — in the 1990 Paul Hogan comedy Almost an Angel — but he had revealed his movie divinity long before that.

With his regal posture, searing blue eyes, perfect jawline and a baritone voice bred for noble declarations, Heston was the ideal vessel for Hollywood grandeur. In the 1950s and 60s, the era of the movie epic — those three-hour extravaganzas with a cast of thousands and the passionate enunciation of high ideals — he was the epic hero; it's almost impossible to imagine the genre without him. To any of these films he added millions in revenue, plenty of muscle and 10 I.Q. points.

"Charlton Heston is an axiom," the French film critic Michel Mourlet famously wrote in a 1960 Cahiers du Cinema essay so acute and fervid that we have to quote a bit more of it. "He constitutes a tragedy in himself, his presence in any film being enough to instill beauty. The pent-up violence expressed by the somber phosphorescence of his eyes, his eagle's profile, the imperious arch of his eyebrows, the hard, bitter curve of his lips, the stupendous strength of his torso — this is what he has been given, and what not even the worst of directors can debase... Through him, mise en scène [a film's visual strategy] can confront the most intense of conflicts and settle them with the contempt of a god imprisoned, quivering with muted rage."

Whether the rage was muted or explosive, Heston was surely a movie Colossus, made to be seen on the wide screens that proliferated in the 50s. Or, even better, on a tall one — the CinemaScope frame should have been stood on its side to do justice to his star bulk, physically and psychologically. Beyond the stupendous torso, he gave the impression of thinking out his dialogue before he spoke it; he was a pensive glamour boy. Like fellow postwar stars Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, he'd tense his neck muscles and speak in a sonorous growl that brought authority and menace to his speeches; he could make piety sound robust. But where Lancaster and Douglas were kinetic, bursting with restlessness, Heston was essentially static — not so much statuesque as a statue in some audio-animatronic hall of Heroes. He stood and he spoke. That's why screenwriters loved him as much as movie audiences did. He was a hero to them all.

He became a villain to many in his later life, when he took up the strident support of conservative causes, most notably that of the National Rifle Association. But no one questioned Heston's personal integrity. Like the characters he played, he said what he believed in, remained faithful to those faithful to him. He was married to the same woman, Lydia Clarke, for 64 years. She was at his side when he died.

BECOMING CHARLTON HESTON
He was born John Carter, on Oct. 24, 1924, in Evanston, Ill. (He would take his stage name from his mother's maiden name and his stepfather's surname.) At his hometown college, Northwestern, he played in student films as Peer Gynt and Marc Antony; already he was set in the heroic mold. In 1944 he married Lydia, also a Northwestern student, and joined the Army Air Force, serving two years as a radio operator. On Broadway in 1947, he played in Antony and Cleopatra with Katharine Cornell (who, the year before, had done Candida with the young Marlon Brando). He did early TV and soon was in Hollywood.

In a movie career that stretched from those student films, to a final appearance in 2003 as Nazi war criminal Joseph Mengele (hey, how'd that happen?), Heston would often venture beyond the epic. He made plenty of Westerns, some important science-fiction films, a few comedies (for which he was constitutionally unsuited). And he was willing to fight for directors he believed in. He assured the financing of Touch of Evil, Orson Welles' most satisfying post-Citizen Kane Hollywood film, by agreeing to star in it. He also offered to give back part of his salary so Sam Peckinpah could finish Major Dundee as he'd planned. (The story goes that the producers took the money but didn't allow the extra shooting. Even if it's not true, it's certainly Hollywood.)

But when a guy like Heston — and, really, there was no guy like Heston — walks onto a set, people line up to put him in majestic roles. Cecil B. De Mille saw his appeal immediately, casting him as the circus owner in the Oscar-winning The Greatest Show on Earth, then giving him the 31-year-old the role of Moses, where Heston, with an old man's beard and a young athlete's energy, holds his staff above his head, parts the waters of the Red Sea and beckons the Israelites to walk on through. That last bit was a special effect, but Heston's Biblical authority was persuasively real. Moreover, The Ten Commandments was a huge hit, ensuring that other religious epics would be made. Heston starred in the biggest, Ben-Hur, which won a then-record 11 Oscars and was the top-grossing film of the decade.

As Judah Ben-Hur, Heston is still lean; he hasn't quite grown into the Greek physique he'd soon acquire. His thin face is dominated by a high, mile-wide brow, which made him a thinking-man hero — and, in his scenes with Stephen Boyd's Messala, Judah's boyhood friend and later deadly rival, startlingly intense. Gore Vidal, who worked on the script, said that the subtext was that the two men had once been lovers. Heston called that preposterous, but homoeroticism was potent in many epics of the time (oh, those Greeks; oh, them Romans!). Anyway, both actors clearly show a bond teetering between eros and agape, before it explodes into a more traditional male rivalry: a chariot race, the NASCAR tour of 29 A.D.

For all the excitement of that nine-minute horse race, Ben-Hur was long and logy. But with Heston now the go-to hero, it guaranteed that he'd be cast in his finest role: el Cid. In this Anthony Mann film, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar is an 11th-century Spanish soldier who tempers force with wisdom, seeking a peace with the large local Islamic minority it is his job to subdue, and preaching moderation in the Court of King Ferdinand. Almost a pacifist warrior, he spends most of the film debating large issues with other beautiful people (Sophia Loren, John Fraser, Raf Vallone) — until the film's final battle, when, nearly dead, he orders that his body be strapped to his horse so that his presence will put fear into the enemy — a peerless metaphor for star quality. El Cid is one of those miracle movies: the ideal melding of a star at the top of his form in a genre at its most intelligent and enthralling.

The movies, TV and the stage never ran out of statesmen and supermen for Heston to play. He was Marc Antony (three times), Andrew Jackson (twice), Thomas Jefferson, Henry VIII, Cardinal Richelieu, Buffalo Bill. He did Macbeth on early live TV and Sir Thomas More in a small-screen revival of A Man for All Seasons. ( He wanted to play the role in the 1966 movie version, but lost out to Paul Scofield, who died last month.) Having cut his great white teeth on Broadway, Heston was the rare mid-century movie star who returned to the stage. Laurence Olivier directed him in The Tumbler, the year after Ben-Hur. He did Long Day's Journey Into Night with Deborah Kerr and Macbeth with Vanessa Redgrave.In 1999 he and his wife, Lydia Clarke, read the Love Letters play in London.

MOSES IN DYSTOPIA
And when he wasn't at home in the past, he was a voyager into the future. For a while in the late 60s and early 70s, Heston owned the upscale science fiction genre. As the stranded astronaut on the Planet of the Apes, he was the ultimate loner: the only member of his species in a world ruled by monkeys. Heston had caught a cold on the shoot, but director Franklin Schaffner insisted they keep filming, because the new gruffness in the star's voice lent a desperate urgency to his lines, from his first words to the simian overlords ("Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!") to his final curse of Planet Earth ("God damn you all to hell!"). Since we've established that Heston was a deity, he could as easily have said, "I damn you all to hell!"

The Apes movie (which spawned four sequels, only one of which Heston appeared in) shows that in Vietnam-era science fiction, no less than in other films of the period, happy endings were not mandatory. Even escapist films offered scant chance of escape from the sour national mood. The 1971 The Omega Man (recently remade with Will Smith as I Am Legend) was another dystopian fantasy film. Again Heston was possibly the last human on earth, battling predatory subhuman creatures who might have been the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground or the Watergate plotters. In the jungle that has replaced civilization, reason gives way to armed self-defense. When another human does show up, and Heston gives her a rifle, she asks what it's for and he replies, "Comfort."

What's worse than a city with no humans? One with too many, in Heston's last big s-f parable, the 1973 Soylent Green. Spinning off the doomsday population predictions of Paul Ehrlich, the movie imagined New York 50 years hence, with 40 million people crushed on the island, half of them out of work. The Soylent Corporation, which runs the town, determines there's only one way to feed these people: by feeding them people. The bitter cop Heston plays is a precursor to the Harrison Ford role in Blade Runner. One big difference: Soylent Green, and Heston's other s-f horror shows, made lots of money. The star's presence brought the crowds in to watch their doomed destiny.

RIGHT AT THE END
Heston's political beliefs followed a familiar trajectory — one that had been traced by a previous SAG president, Ronald Reagan — of liberal Democrat turned conservative Republican. In the early 60s he was a civil rights advocate, and accompanied Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1963 March on Washington. He opposed Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War, and in 1968, after Robert Kennedy's assassination, he called for gun controls. He rejected a plea from prominent Democrats to run for the U.S. Senate only because, unlike Reagan when he segued into politics, Heston still had a thriving movie career.

But as time marches on in political events, at an ever more agitated pace, the advance guard often becomes the rear guard, and then disburses, grumbling. So Heston supported restrictions on abortion; he campaigned for Reagan (possible bumper sticker: "God Likes the Gipper") and both Bushes; he inadvisedly posed for a photo with a white supremacist leader. He spoke at any conservative function that would have him, and what group wouldn't? At these appearances he showed a thespic vitality absent from his diminishing turns before the movie and TV cameras. The actor's stentorian talents may have been looking for the kind of forum they had lately been denied in films. If screenwriters would no longer write heroic lines for his movie characters, he'd do it himself.

No question, he came up with a great one. in 1998 Heston, who had long since renounced his gun-control stance, became president of the NRA. Two years later, addressing an NRA convention, he mimicked Moses‚ gesture at the Red Sea by holding above his head one of the 400 firearms he owned — a handmade Brooks flintlock rifle — and proclaiming that the Democratic Presidential candidate could remove that gun only by prying it "from my cold, dead hands." It was as if Al Gore was Messala, or the Ape King, or the Omega man's marauders, or a band of Comanches who needed a comeuppance of defiant rhetoric plus massive weaponry. The declaration assured that popular history would now remember Heston not just as a movie axiom but as the Holy Gun Fighter.

That stance earned him death threats in punk rock songs and, if not pariah status in Hollywood, then the image of a cranky grandpa. Which hardly flustered Heston; he'd been playing the righteous loner for too long to lose sleep from exile by the reigning Hollywood Left. ("Political correctness," he said in a 1999 speech at the Harvard Law School, "is tyranny with manners.") When Michael Moore came to the actor's home and confronted him, for the climactic scene of the 2002 pro-gun-control documentary Bowling for Columbine, Heston looked both gracious and stern, perplexed and frail. In movie terms it was an unfair fight, because Moore had the heavier artillery: not his arguments, necessarily, but his camera and the power of an editor over an actor.

Heston remained NRA President until 2003, when he resigned in acknowledgment of Alzheimer's ravages. That year, the Association erected, in front of its D.C. headquarters, a 10-ft. bronze likeness of Heston as the cowboy Will Penny, brandishing a handgun. The man who seemed like sculpture on screen had become a statue in honor of his favorite cause.

It's somehow fitting that Heston should be viewed as a larger-than-life anachronism. He is an emissary from a time when movies took themselves and their subjects seriously, when a leading man didn't have to crack wise to win over the audience, when stalwart trumped facetious, and screen conversation was more eloquent and elevated. In all those decades of heroes, Heston never once played one based on a comic book; his films‚ sources were the Bible, ancient history and Shakespeare.

It's inconceivable that such movies could be made today — in part because popular culture has changed no less than political fashions. But mainly because there's no one remotely like Charlton Heston to give them stature, fire and guts.

• Richard Corliss