Charlton Heston did not do small.
Heston, the Oscar-winning actor who, as the biggest male star of Hollywood's outsize epic era of the 1950s and 1960s, parted the Red Sea, raced chariots and battled gorilla tyranny, died Saturday at his Beverly Hills home.
He was 84, his family said. He had been battling Alzheimer's disease for years.
In a statement, Heston's family acknowledged that their patriarch was viewed as larger than life and maintained that, offscreen, he was no less imposing.
"We knew him as an adoring husband, a kind and devoted father, and a gentle grandfather, with an infectious sense of humor," the statement said. "He served these far greater roles with tremendous faith, courage and dignity. He loved deeply, and he was deeply loved."
In all, Heston worked on screen for more than 50 years, in more than 100 films and TV productions, including The Ten Commandments, in which he played the lawgiver Moses; Ben-Hur, in which he commanded the epic production as the title's chariot-racing prince; and the original Planet of the Apes, in which he was, simply, the last real man on Earth. (View the Charlton Heston: Life in Movies gallery.)
Heston was nominated once for an Oscar—and he won once, claiming the 1959 Best Actor Academy Award trophy for Ben-Hur.
Born October 4, 1923 (some sources say 1924) in Evanston, Ill., Heston made his film debut as a teenager in a silent, 16-mm production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt.
"David [Bradley, the director] somehow perceived in me what other directors also found," Heston later wrote in his 1995 autobiography, In the Arena: "My face is useful to the camera."
Useful, indeed.
The right man at the right time, Heston's sinewy frame came into focus in the 1950s when the big screen, faced with the upstart television, truly became big, via the advent of the wide screen. This was the time when the Red Sea was parted under Heston's hand. Other credits of his from this era included 1952's star-studded circus tale, The Greatest Show on Earth; 1961's El Cid, opposite Sophia Loren; and 1965's The Agony and the Ecstasy, in which he painted a portrait of master artist Michaelangelo.
In a 1962 poll by the Hollywood Foreign Press, Heston was named one of the world's two favorite movie stars. Marilyn Monroe was the other.
Beginning in the late 1960s with Planet of the Apes, Heston's career shifted toward apocalyptic sci-fi and disaster tales in which he invariably was the last man on Earth, the only man who could save it or, in the case of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the only man who could destroy it, in order to save it from itself.
The Omega Man, a 1971 remake of the classic Richard Matheson last-man-standing tale that was remade again last year as Will Smith's I Am Legend; Soylent Green, the unsavory 1973 sci-fi thriller; Earthquake, the 1974 Sensurround-enhanced disaster soap; and Two-Minute Warning, the 1976 football-sniper thriller, were other notable works from his scorched-Earth period.
All told, Heston spent three decades as a major Hollywood draw. From the 1980s on, he spent three decades as an elder statesman—cameoing as Arnold Schwarzenegger's boss in True Lies, lending the weight of his voice to Armageddon as its unseen narrator; and giving his blessing to Tim Burton's 2001 Planet of the Apes remake by taking a turn-the-tables role as an ape.
As Heston told Barnes & Noble.com in 2001: "I've certainly had my share of great parts."
To the New York Times in 1980, Heston reflected that his movie career involved a lot of facial hair. He estimated, in fact, that no leading man spent more time under the cover of a beard than him. Something that was especially so when it came to his signature role of Moses.
"I wore nine different beards, beginning with one of my own that was barely more than stubble and ended up with a snowy white two-footer," Heston told the newspaper.
Another of Heston's most famous, if more offbeat, roles saw him sport a mustache in the 1958 Orson Welles-directed noir classic Touch of Evil. The film, another of the many Welles projects that didn't end well for its director, was reedited and rereleased in 1998, giving Heston perhaps his last true big-screen triumph.
Offscreen, Heston served in the Air Force during World War II, picketed restaurants and stood with Martin Luther King Jr. in the name of civil rights and visited the U.S. troops during the Vietnam War.
In the end, his lifetime of activism was largely defined by three words: National Rifle Association. Heston headed the group as its president from 1998 to 2002, casting the former Kennedy Democrat up as a hero to the right, a villain to the left and a subject for filmmaker Michael Moore's 2002 look at violence in America, Bowling for Columbine.
Just before Columbine was released in theaters, Heston, then 78, announced in a video message that he was "suffering symptoms consistent with Alzheimer's disease," but that he was neither giving up, nor giving in.
"For an actor, there is no greater loss than the loss of his audience," Heston said at the time. "I can part the Red Sea, but I can't part with you, which is why I won't exclude you from this stage in my life.