Perhaps the best-known image of Charlton Heston--the default picture to sit atop the many obits that ran after he died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills--was of the actor as Moses, holding up the Ten Commandments. Although he eventually became the National Rifle Association's leader with a zeal that made one wonder if he'd seen something on those tablets about the right to bear arms, over the span of his life he emerges on balance more as a libertarian than right-wing crank. (Though it is hard to erase a second memorable image of Heston holding a musket over his head at a convention of the firearms-faithful, hollering, "From my cold dead hands!") Having begun his career being praised for his stage work by Olivier, and more or less closing it as the Player King in Kenneth Branagh' s 1996 film Hamlet, he wasn't one to miss a moment that was teed up for him.

His death within a day of the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination offers a window into a kinder, gentler Heston from the 1960's. The image accompanying this post shows Heston in Washington on August 28, 1963, huddling with James Baldwin and Hollywood fixture (he won Best Director and Best Screenplay Oscars two years running, the latter pair for 1950's Best Picture All About Eve) Joseph Mankiewicz. They would be marching with Dr. King en route to his famous "I Have A Dream" speech before 200,000 who had gathered to prod Congress to take action on civil rights. Heston, nominally there as president of the Screen Actors Guild (his predecessor was Ronald Reagan) read a statement from James Baldwin--who'd agreed to avoid the podium because he'd becomethe symbol of a kind of apocalyptic uprising as author of The Fire Next Time--
As Heston told the Chicago Sun Times in 2000,

I wasn't crazy about that idea. Anything that goes out with my name on it, I write. Besides, Jimmy Baldwin was on the left fringe of the civil rights movement. I don't know how Dr. King felt about his being there. But the point is, he was there.

When an awful lot of good parlor liberals didn't show up in case things turned nasty, Jimmy did. What's more, as a good writer, the speech he wrote for me wasn't what he would have written, but instead close to what I wanted to say. He died (in 1987) . . . in self- imposed exile in Paris. We'd both traveled some little distance to come together, though, as so many hundreds of thousands of people did that day.

Malcolm X, disgusted that Baldwin couldn't speak, would erroneously report that Burt Lancaster had delivered Baldwin's thoughts that day. It wasn't an entirely illogical mistake: though Lancaster was born eleven years earlier, in 1913 both arrived at their career peaks in the late 50's slid into the 60's. Lancaster had scored early in the 50's with Come Back Little Sheba and From Here To Eternity, but bettered those with is role as J.J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell Of Success in `57, and Elmer Gantry in 1960. Heston was The Ten Commandments' Moses in 1956, the Mexican detective Manuel (Mike) in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil in `58, and Ben Hur in `59. As David Thomson writes in describing him as the essence of the "monolithic" actor: "The man who contributes to a film through his presence and the innate splendor of honest muscle and strong-jawed virtue. He was the screen hero of the 1950's and early 1960s..." Still, Thomson finds him overrated: ".., he falls a little short--not as reflective as Mitchum, but not as gaily agile as Burt Lancaster."

If Lancaster cemented his stature among cineastes with Visconti's 1963 The Leopard and Louis Malle's 1980 Atlantic City, Heston -before becoming somehow constricted by his growing political rigidity? --may have notched his most interesting performances during his second career act. He did it with Will Penny, the role he said was closest to his own loner nature in 1968, and the following year's Number One--respectively about a cowpoke and a quarterback past their primes.

There's another shot from that day in Washington, showing a distracted, half-turned Heston in an unguarded moment, perhaps not long before he took the stage. (Unlike Marlon Brando, who appeared clutching a cattle prod from Dixie-fied Gadsden, Alabama, he had no prop but his own
air of righteousness.) The edge of anguish in his eyes is a reminder of the mostly hidden complexities beneath. If the Times of London also poor-mouthed him in their obit with the assessment of "a little unapproachable on film -- not quite as interestingly flawed as Henry Fonda or Gary Cooper", Heston deployed a potent screen persona by using what Pauline Kael, as quoted in the Washington post called, reviewing his epochal Planet of the Apes, ": his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body, Heston is a godlike hero; built for strength, he's an archetype of what makes Americans win. He doesn't play nice guy; he's harsh and hostile, self-centered and hot-tempered. Yet we don't hate him because he's so magnetically strong; he represents American power -- and he has the profile of an eagle."

Though he consistently dined out on his connection to King--including one of his rabble-rousing speeches that caused a sensation when Rush Limbaugh read it on the air--his latter-day conservative-leaning politics probably cost him most of his Hollywood credence, at least until the recent run of rather fond obituaries. One memorable moment came when he stood up at a Time Warner shareholders' meeting in 1992 to protest an Ice-T's "Cop Killer". Slowly intoning the song's lyrics, he managed to help strong-arm the company into censorng Ice-T, and the song was lifted from the album.

He might have been a good ally for Tipper Gore in that sense--Ice-T spat out vulgarities about Al and Tipper's 12-year-old niece in the song--, but he would collide poetically with Al Gore, using Gore as the whipping boy for his famous speech at a Charlotte NRA raly in 2000: "When the loss of liberty looms as it does now, this is for those who would take it -- and especially for you, Mr. Gore -- from my -- cold -- dead -- hands!"

Of course a life lived on alternating sides of the political fence can have its own brutal contradictions. The rifle that James Earl Ray--who lived for a spell in a crummy hotel on Hollywood Boulevard--used to kill King was purchased from a Birmingham, Alabama gun store using an alias, because Ray himself was a prison escapee. But even after the legislation Lyndon Johnson pushed through in the wake the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations in 1968 had wide-ranging impact, it would not, the pro-gun faction claims, have prevented Ray's purchase of the rifle. (Beyond citing the claim, this writer doesn't claim the expertise to weigh in on the legal intricacies of gun control in America.)

By the time Michael Moore returned the favor, ensnaring Heston as the bad guy in what has gone down as one of the documentarian's less shining moments, Heston had grown frail. He retreated, in what Thomson calls "maybe the most moving scene in all of his work", and soon would be looking down the barrel of Alzheimer's. Though his cause of death w as not stated, he was showing likely symptoms of the malady when he sent a note his well-wishers saying, "I must reconcile courage and surrender in equal measure. Please feel no sympathy for me," and quoting the words of Prospero In Shakespeare's The Tempest:

Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air...

(James Baldwin, Charlton Heston and Joseph Mankiewicz after arriving in Washington D.C. for the August, 1963 civil rights march; photo by Eliot Elisofon/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)