April 6 (Bloomberg) -- Charlton Heston, the Oscar-winning actor who played some of the most famous roles in Hollywood history including Moses parting the Red Sea, Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel and Ben-Hur driving a Roman chariot, has died, his family said. He was 84.

Heston had suffered from symptoms of Alzheimer's disease since 2002. He died at his home in California with his wife of 64 years, Lydia, by his side, his family said late yesterday.

A leading man on the screen, Heston was a leader in Hollywood as well, heading the Screen Actors Guild and the American Film Institute. A Democrat who supported civil rights, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in the early 1960s, Heston, like his friend Ronald Reagan, became a conservative. Near the end of his film career, he headed the National Rifle Association, decrying what he saw as government efforts to rob gun owners of their constitutional rights.

``Charlton Heston was seen by the world as larger than life,'' a family statement read. ``He was known for his chiseled jaw, broad shoulders and resonating voice, and, of course, for the roles he played.''

President George W. Bush praised Heston as a man who had an impact on the nation off the screen as well as on.

``He served his country during World War II, marched in the civil rights movement, led a labor union, and vigorously defended Americans' Second Amendment rights,'' Bush said in a statement as he flew home from Russia today. ``He was a man of character and integrity, with a big heart.''

Fame as Moses

Heston stood 6-feet-3-inches, and his baritone voice, iron jaw, aquiline nose and rippling muscles lent masculine strength and sex appeal to many of his roles, any number of which he played bare-chested. He gained fame as Moses in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille epic, ``The Ten Commandments'' and owned the role ever after.

Heston also played Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Thomas More, John the Baptist, Cardinal Richelieu and Mark Anthony among dozens of others on stage, television and the movies. He made more than 70 films.

He was the ``actor of choice for historical drama'' in the 1950s and '60s, Robert Osborne, host of Turner Classic Movies on cable television and a columnist for the Hollywood Reporter, once said of him.

``Charlton Heston looked like he came from another era,'' Osborne said in a June 2006 interview. ``He looked like he was kind of chiseled out of granite. He looked heroic.''

Heston won an Academy Award for best actor playing Judah Ben-Hur in 1959, which featured a legendary 11-minute chariot race scene, and he was a recipient of Kennedy Center honors in 1997. He received the Presidential Medal of Honor from George W. Bush in 2003.

Illinois Born

Heston was born John Charles Carter in Evanston, Illinois, on Oct. 4, 1923, though the year of his birth has been in dispute, with some sources saying he was born in 1924.

The family soon after moved to rural Michigan, where his parents divorced. His mother remarried and moved to Wilmette, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. Heston took his professional name by combining his mother's maiden name, Lila Charlton, with that of his stepfather, Chester Heston.

Heston described himself as a nerd when he was a child, ``before the word had even been invented -- shy, skinny, short, pimply, and ill-dressed.'' He started acting in high school plays and won a scholarship to Northwestern University.

He said he got a lucky break playing football when he cracked his nose. It gave him a more rugged face.

``It's been a vast asset to my career,'' he has said.

Army Air Corps

Heston served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II, and married Lydia Clarke, also a student at Northwestern, in 1944. The couple had two children, including a son, Fraser Clarke, who played the baby Moses in ``The Ten Commandments.''

After getting out of the military and doing some modeling in New York, Heston headed to Hollywood. He had one film, ``Dark City,'' on his resume when he had a stroke of luck. Driving out of the studio lot one day in his convertible, he waved at director DeMille. DeMille liked the wave, asked who he was and signed him to play the circus manager in, ``The Greatest Show on Earth.''

The film won the Oscar for best picture in 1952 and led Heston to the role of Moses in DeMille's ``The Ten Commandments,'' which also won an Oscar as best picture.

It was ``surely one of the best roles in the history of film,'' Heston wrote years later.

``Ben-Hur'' came in 1959, and Heston spent five weeks learning how to drive a team of four white horses for the chariot race scene, one of the greatest action scenes ever filmed.

Chariot Skills

``Charioteering is a hard-won and largely useless skill, but I can't help taking pride in it,'' he wrote. He liked to joke that his trainer assured him, ``Just stay in the chariot, and I guarantee you're going to win the damn race.''

His other major films included ``El Cid,'' ``Major Dundee,'' ``Khartoum,'' ``Soylent Green,'' ``Midway,'' Earthquake,'' and ``Planet of The Apes,'' a science-fiction tale in which he played the only human who could speak in a world ruled by chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, uttering in one scene, ``Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape.''

Heston attributed at least some of his fame as an actor to the roles he played.

``The shadow of those guys kind of rubs off a little bit, and has left me a kind of iconic identity which I don't deserve,'' he once said.

Researched Roles

Heston carefully researched the historical figures that he played, trying to see what made them tick. While pleased with many of his portrayals, he said, ``I've almost never been content with what I've done in any film.''

While Heston had an aura of glamour, critics didn't consider him the equal of contemporaries such as Marlon Brando or Montgomery Clift.

``He was a wonderful movie star,'' Osborne said. ``I'm not sure that he was one of our great actors. Personally, I think he was somewhat of a `posey' actor. But you always had to admit he had great screen presence, and he took on some very tough roles and played them very well.''

``He's not a bad actor, but he's humorlessly unresilient,'' the late critic Pauline Kael said of him after his movie ``Earthquake'' in 1974. ``He underacts grimly and he turns into a stereotype of himself.''

Paid a Price

Like many of those who achieved fame in show business, Heston paid a price. In 2000, he checked himself into an alcohol rehabilitation center because he felt his social drinking had gotten out of hand.

``I wasn't falling over, but I realized it had become an addiction for me,'' he said, and he stopped drinking.

Heston, who was known as Chuck to his friends, was popular within the movie community and, like Reagan, was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, serving six terms from 1965 until 1971.

Politics attracted Heston, and he said he voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and marched for civil rights, attending the Reverend Martin Luther King's ``I Have a Dream'' rally in Washington in 1963.

At times, Republicans and Democrats alike approached him to run for the U.S. Senate, he said. He declined, fearing he would have to give up acting.

Conversion to Conservatism

As late as 1968, after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Heston was supporting gun control. But he wrote that his conversion to conservatism began in 1964, when he saw a billboard for Republican Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign. It said: ``In your heart, you know he's right.'' Concluded Heston: ``He IS right.''

Heston's career surged in an era when ``the difference between good and evil, and the eventual triumph of the good, the reward of the virtuous, of the heroic, was almost always recognized,'' he said in a 1995 interview. ``Yet, more and more, we see films made that diminish the American experience and example, and sometimes trash it completely.''

Heston saw a cultural war ``raging across our land, storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self confidence,'' he said in speeches.

Opposed Gun Control

He decried affirmative action and feminism, complained of bloated government. And he changed his mind about gun control, becoming a vehement opponent of it.

Heston became president of the National Rifle Association in 1998, holding the job until 2003 and touring the country protesting efforts to restrict gun ownership. He developed a mantra dear to NRA crowds: Raising a rifle overhead he would shout that the only way gun-control advocates could take it would be to pry it ``from my cold, dead hands.''

In defiance of President Bill Clinton's call for increased gun controls, NRA members sometimes put bumper stickers on their cars that read ``Charlton Heston is My President.''

``He helped to blaze a path for celebrities in politics,'' said Emilie Raymond, an assistant professor of American history at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of a book on Heston and politics, ``From My Cold, Dead Hands'' (University Press of Kentucky, 400 pages).

Using the image he built with Americans as Moses and other authority figures, he helped conservatives in backing right-to- work laws and trying to give union members more say in union political donations, Raymond said.

Credibility for NRA

Also, ``he helped unite the NRA and give it a credibility with middle-class voters that it had not had,'' she said.

In 2002, Heston said he had been diagnosed with a neurological disorder and had symptoms similar to those of Alzheimer's disease.

``No one could ask for a fuller life than his,'' his family said. ``No man could have given more to his family, to his profession, and to his country,'' the statement said, adding a private memorial service would be held. No date for the service was given.

He is survived by his wife Lydia, children Fraser Clarke Heston and Holly Heston Rochell, and three grandchildren.

To contact the reporter on this story: Bill Arthur in Washington at barthur@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: April 6, 2008 15:17 EDT