Dept. of Outspoken Celebrities: From His Cold, Dead Hands

CHARLTON HESTON'S ACTING career made him an icon of Hollywood, with roles ranging from the Biblical, as Moses in "The Ten Commandments," to the modern, as a hard-boiled detective in "Touch of Evil," to the futuristic, as an astronaut in "Planet of the Apes."

Of course, as Tom Lehrer noted, show business and politics often go hand in hand, and, in that tradition, Heston's legacy is not only cinematic, but also political. Heston's allegiances varied over the years as were the causes which he supported: Heston supported Kennedy and Johnson in their Presidential bids, as well as Nixon and Reagan in theirs; he was a staunch supporter of the civil rights movement, though one who disapproved strongly of affirmative action; he opposed McCarthyism and the Vietnam War; he supported gun control legislation after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, but, some 30 years later, assumed the presidency of the NRA.

Heston certainly deserves to be remembered for his mark on Hollywood, as well as his political work for both conservative and progressive causes. But, as a progressive, I find his insistence that the Second Amendment entitles him, as a citizen, to keep his firearms until pried from his "cold, dead hands" detracts greatly from my memory of him. However, it is still with some sorrow that his death finds me. Indeed, the death of an apparently conflicted man makes for conflicted memories.

He was 84.