Charlton Heston, the veteran actor and quondam spokesman for the National Rifle Association, has died, probably from complications of Alzheimer's disease. The family spokesman who announced his death last night refused to disclose the cause, but Heston himself admitted he had symptoms "consistent with Alzheimer's" in 2002.
Heston has always been a conflicted figure for me--and that conflict extends to my feelings about the man and his politics. As the New York Times notes in the headline to its obituary for Heston, he was an "epic film star." As I parse that phrase, however, the emphasis belongs on the phrase "epic film." Heston was not an epic star, he was a star in epic films. And I never really felt that his acting was all that good in them.
Heston always seemed wooden to me on the screen--and especially in the biblical epics for which he was most famous (though perhaps that is part and parcel of that particular genre of film). The role that made Heston's career was Moses in The Ten Commandments. I still watch that movie at least once a year, but nowadays it's more for its appeal as an unintentional camp classic than for the brilliance of the acting (or the lack thereof; for my money, the best performance in that film was turned in by Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Sethi the Great). Moreover, playing the role of Moses and also doing the voice of God in that film, it always seemed to me that Mr. Heston identified a little too closely with the Deity thereafter, confusing his own voice and his opinions with those of the Lord.
Heston's politics were conflicted as well. Early in his life he was a Democrat and something of a liberal. He campaigned for John F. Kennedy, supported Martin Luther King, Jr., and participated in the 1963 civil rights march on Washington. After Robert Kennedy's assassination in 1968, Heston appeared on television with Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, and Jimmy Stewart and urged support for Lyndon Johnson's Gun Control Act. He changed his political affiliations after Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate. In 1998, he became president of the NRA. And while the most iconic image of Heston's career may well be the shot of him as Moses, standing by the shore of the Red Sea with hands outstretched to part the waters, the photograph of a much older Heston, holding a replica of a colonial musket over his head at the 2000 NRA convention and intoning "From my cold, dead hands," cannot be far behind.
Whatever one might think of Heston's politics, and it certainly seems to me that he spent the last twenty years of his life hanging out with the wrong crowd, and lending credibility to people who did not deserve it and whose actions would likely have been repulsive to Heston in his earlier days, no one deserves Alzheimer's and it is far from being an easy or a pleasant way to die. I hope he finds some peace at last. My condolences to his wife and family on their loss.
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