Heston died Saturday at his Beverly Hills home, said family spokesman Bill Powers. In 2002, he had been diagnosed with symptoms similar to those of Alzheimer’s disease.
A strapping figure of commanding presence, Heston seemed particularly suited to such roles as Moses, the biblical patriarch, Ben-Hur, the fictional hero of Roman times, and the ringmaster who presided over operations in the “The Greatest Show on Earth” (1952).
As the title character in “Ben-Hur,” whose strength and pluck enabled him to escape slavery in a Roman galley and win a fiercely contested chariot race, Heston won the 1959 Oscar for best actor.
From The New York Times
When the film was released in 1956, more than three and a half hours long and the most expensive that De Mille had ever made, Mr. Heston became a marquee name. Whether leading the Israelites through the wilderness, parting the Red Sea or coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets from God in hand, he was a Moses to remember.
Writing in The New York Times nearly 30 years afterward, when the film was re-released for a brief run, Vincent Canby called it “a gaudy, grandiloquent Hollywood classic” and suggested there was more than a touch of “the rugged American frontiersman of myth” in Mr. Heston’s Moses.
The same quality made Mr. Heston an effective spokesman, off-screen, 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.
