Epic actor, gun activist Charlton Heston dies at 83

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. He was 83.

His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Bill Powers, who declined to discuss the cause. In August 2002, Heston announced that he had been diagnosed with neurological symptoms "consistent with Alzheimer's disease."

The same quality of gravitas that made Heston a believable Moses leading the Israelites through the wilderness and parting the Red Sea, made him an effective spokesman, offscreen, 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 Heston, the NRA found its embodiment of pioneer values - pride, independence and valor. In a speech at the NRA's annual convention in 2000, he brought the audience to its feet with a ringing attack on gun-control advocates. Paraphrasing an NRA 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!"

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, Heston wound up defending the agency against charges of elitism.

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by the rap artist Ice T, he blasted the album at a Time Warner stockholders meeting and was a force in having it withdrawn from the marketplace.

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 NRA.

The next year, at 73, he was elected president of the NRA. In his speech at the association's convention before his election, he trained his oratorical artillery on President Bill Clinton's White House: "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."

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

He had 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. *