"'Hard' is what I do best," Charlton Heston once told a photographer. "I don't do 'nice."' Strange words, perhaps, coming from an actor who has specialized in playing symbols of rectitude such as Moses, Judah Ben-Hur, and even Jehovah Himself. Yet this steely-eyed, jut-jawed performer has excelled at infusing his heroic portrayals with an almost fearsome iconic power. He has brought a comparable flintiness to his civic life as a firearms activist and itinerant right-wing gadfly.

A speech and drama graduate of Northwestern University, Heston was a stolid if unspectacular presence in Westerns and war pictures of the 1950s. He made his big (Red Sea) splash playing Moses in the 1956 epic The Ten Commandments. That Biblical classic started him on a long string of historical parts, including the title roles in Ben-Hur (1959), for which he earned a Best Actor Oscar, and El Cid...