Charlton Heston, a larger-than-life man who portrayed larger-than-life men such as Moses and Michelangelo, died at his home in Los Angeles late Saturday night at the age of 83, his wife of 64 years by his side. While no cause of death was given, in 2002 the Hollywood legend announced that he had been diagnosed with symptoms consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.

On screen, Mr. Heston parted the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments, drove the Moors from Spain in El Cid, painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling in The Agony and the Ecstasy, baptized Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told, and gave him a drink of water in Ben-Hur.

A longtime champion of civil rights, of government support of the arts, and of gun ownership, the perennial activist - and Oscar winner, for Ben-Hur - may well have been the only pro-NEA, pro-NRA voice in Hollywood.

The liberal actor, who marched in 1963 with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, in 1969 turned down Democratic pols who drafted him to run for the U.S. Senate. “I’d rather play a senator than be one,” he said in an apparent dig at actor-turned-pol Ronald Reagan, whom he would later support.

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HESTON’S FILMS;

Dark City, 1950, The Greatest Show on Earth, 1952, The Savage, 1952, Ruby Gentry, 1952, The President’s Lady, 1953, Lucy Gallant, 1955, The Ten Commandments, 1956, Touch of Evil, 1958, The Big Country, 1958, The Buccaneer, 1958, The Wreck of the Mary Deare-1959, Ben-Hur, 1959, El Cid, 1961, 55 Days at Peking, 1963, The Greatest Story Ever Told, 1965, Major Dundee, 1965, The Agony and the Ecstasy, 1965, Khartoum, 1966, Planet of the Apes, 1968, Will Penny, 1968, Number One, 1969, The Omega Man, 1971, Call of the Wild, 1972, Soylent Green, 1973, The Three Musketeers, 1974, Airport 1975, 1974, Earthquake, 1974, Gray Lady Down, 1978, Almost an Angel, 1990, Wayne’s World 2, 1993, True Lies, 1994

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