This Charlton Heston was a gentleman and huge fan of Shakespeare

Such assessments seemed to forget that Heston was equally good at playing modern men of less-than-epic proportions. "Touch of Evil," "Earthquake," "Skyjacked," "Will Penny," "Dark City," "Ruby Gentry," "Airport 1975," "Lucy Gallant," "Bad for Each Other," "Two-Minute Warning," "The Pigeon That Took Rome," "Number One." Perhaps the films weren't as good as "Ben-Hur," but that was no fault of Heston's. He could even do comedy and poke fun at himself as in "Wayne's World 2," "The Dame Edna Experience" and "The Milton Berle Show."

Casting a further pall over these judgments of Heston the actor was the image of Heston the National Rifle Assn. advocate, holding a rifle above his head and saying, "From my cold dead hands." I am not aware that any of Heston's detractors -- and there were many -- ever asked him if he were pro-Constitution or merely pro-gun or both. Many had suggested that Heston's position was at least partially responsible for an increasingly violent United States in which television's evening news serves us blood slaughter along with our buttered spinach.

Although I am not a supporter of the NRA's stance, my attitude toward Heston was slightly schizoid. I remembered that he had called for gun control after the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy; that he had taken a stand against the McCarthy witch hunts, the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon; and that he had campaigned for civil rights. I found it hard to reconcile that Heston with the public Heston of the last decade.

And I had my own back story with Heston. We weren't friends, but, yes, I knew him. We played our roles on a different stage. I, as a professor of film studies and English literature; he, as an actor as gifted at playing Shakespeare's Macbeth or Antony as at playing Ben-Hur or Moses.