Film Legend Charlton Heston Dead at 84

Charlton Heston, the Oscar winning star of Ben Hur, dies aged 84.

Heston also portrayed Moses, Michelangelo and El Cid in Hollywood epics of the 1950s and 1960s.

As president of the United States gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, he was a controversial figure - but earlier in his career he had also been a leading light of the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King.

He had a steely jaw, piercing gaze and deep resonant voice. He was every inch a Hollywood leading man.

Born John Charles Carter in suburban Illinois in the mid-1920s, he wanted a career on stage not screen.

He moved to New York and worked on and off Broadway as an actor in classic plays.

Yet director Cecil B. DeMille had alternative plans casting him as the circus manager in his breakthrough film, The Greatest Show on Earth, in 1952.

A series of low budget films followed until DeMille rescued him again with The Ten Commandments.

DeMille reportedly thought him a living copy of Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses. The 6'3", muscular, squared jawed actor became an icon, playing this role.

Heston's status as the iconic actor in historical epics, firmly established in 1959, he was picked for his greatest role, Ben Hur.

Heston only considered after Marlon Brandon and Burt Lancaster turned down the role of the Jewish prince betrayed.

There were no stunt drivers in the chariot scene and the performance won him an Oscar.

He became for a time, Hollywood's best paid actor.

Heston starred in a number of science fiction and disaster films such as Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, Earthquake, and Airport - all successful, cult films.

In politics Heston started out as a Democrat and campaigned for JF Kennedy and the civil rights movement, accompanying Martin Luther King on marches.

When a segregated cinema showed his film, he joined a picket in front of it. He even backed calls for gun control. "I was young and foolish," he later explained.

By the 1980s, in the Reagan years, his political affiliations changed.

He opposed affirmative action, criticised political correctness, and the media for liberal bias and became spokesman of the National Rifle Association in 1998.

Via channel4.com