Charlton Heston (1924-2008): 'I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be an actor.'

Born John Charles Carter on October 4th 1924 in Evanston, Illinois, Charlton Heston's career spanned an almost unprecedented 50 years of stage, television and film work, winning the SAG Academy Award for Best Actor in the film Ben-Hur, which itself won eleven Oscars, unprecedented up until almost 40 years later when James Cameron's Titanic tied Ben-Hur for the most Oscars won by any film.

His energies and talents in his later years went more towards promoting traditional conservative causes, such as the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.

But -- agree or disagree with his politics, he was GREAT Actor, and he will be remembered for that for a very very long time.

Thank you Chuck! You did damn good up there, on the Boards and in the Lights:

The great roles are always Shakespearean
- Charlton Heston.

While the legacy of Charlton Heston's political activitism spans almost 50 years, from traditional progressive causes such as civil rights to his later traditional conservative causes, It was probably his unabased support of gun rights that earned him both the most admirmation and scorn. Admirmation and scorn aside, there's no question that Charlton Heston's later years, full of passion and energy, had a profound effect on the entire debate, i.e., I ran across this from The Right-Wing Liberal blog:

Yet it was in 1998 that the gun rights movement was making a comeback, bucking the trend of defeat and demoralization on the right wing. This was in no small part due to one man - Charlton Heston, who in that year was elected President of the NRA.

By the time Heston stepped down five years later, the political world had changed. Certainly, 9/11 and the WBK War had much to do with that, but 9/11 could just as easily been a gun-control bonanza. It wasn’t because the gun-rights movement was energized, confident, and mobilized, in a way it never could have been without Heston. Thus, in 2004, the “assault weapons” ban of 1994 was allowed to sunset. Four years later, Washington’s ridiculous gun ban seems on the way out, courtesy of the Supreme Court, and with the approval of the Republican nominee for President