Charlton Heston, whose chiseled-granite looks and commanding manner led him to portray some of history’s most extraordinary men — from Moses to Michelangelo, John the Baptist to El Cid — has died. He was 84.
The actor, who won a best actor Oscar for the title role in 1959’s “Ben Hur,” died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills with his wife Lydia at his side, according to family spokesman Bill Powers, who declined to comment on the cause of death.
In 2002, Heston revealed in a videotaped statement that he had symptoms consistent with Alzheimer’s disease. Saying, “I must reconcile courage and surrender in equal measure,” he began to exit the public stage, where he was known for his work with both SAG and the American Film Institute as well as for political activism that saw him take up causes that ranged from civil rights to gun ownership.

Heston’s towering presence was tailor-made for the widescreen epics of the ’50s and ’60s, when he starred in such films as “The Ten Commandments,” “El Cid,” “55 Days in Peking,” “The Agony and the Ectasy” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”
“I have a face that belongs in another century,” he often remarked.
In the ’70s, his lent his heroic demeanor to both disaster movies such as “Earthquake” and “Airport ‘75″ and sci-fi pics such as “Soylent Green” and “Planet of the Apes,” where where he delivered such memorable lines as “Soylent Green is people!” and “Damn you. Damn you all to hell!”
But Heston’s first film was actually an indie, an adaptation of “Peer Gynt” that he filmed while a student at Northwestern University in the early ’40s. Among his more than 100 film and television appearances, he also took detours into such fare as Orson Welles’ 1958 film noir “Touch of Evil,” Richard Lester’s 1973 comic romp “The Three Musketeers” and, spoofing himself, in 1993’s “Wayne’s World 2.”
Producer Hal B. Wallis, spotting Heston in a 1950 television production of “Wuthering Heights,” gave the young actor his first professional movie role in the crime drama “Dark City,” which led Cecil B. DeMille to cast him as the circus manager in “The Greatest Show on Earth,” which won the Oscar for best picture of 1952.

source hollywoodreport.com