Conservative politics, slumping career
Heston became involved in the civil-rights struggle around this time, and he was elected president of the Screen Actors’ Guild. But he also became more conservative, following the lead of another SAG president, Ronald Reagan.

“People say to me ‘You had a political change of heart, didn’t you?’” he wrote in “In the Arena.” “No, I don’t think I did. I think the Democratic Party had a change of heart. To my mind, the Democrats I voted for and worked for couldn’t be nominated by their party today, including Jack Kennedy.”

The success of “El Cid,” which became one of the top-grossing movies of 1962, was followed by a series of low-grossing mediocrities, including a painfully unfunny comedy (“The Pigeon That Took Rome”), a trashy melodrama (“Diamond Head”) and a confused historical epic (“55 Days at Peking”).

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Heston wasn’t at his best in any of these, and his worthy attempts to play Michelangelo in “The Agony and the Ecstasy” and John the Baptist in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” failed to connect with the public. He fought for Sam Peckinpah’s right to a final cut on “Major Dundee,” even giving up his $300,000 salary to reduce the escalatiing budget, but the film was butchered and released in an incomprehensible version. His reunion with director Franklin J. Schaffner on “The War Lord” went unnoticed.

Success in strange places
In 1966, he made something of a comeback, giving one of his most detailed and interesting performances as the doomed General Charles Gordon in the unusually intelligent historical epic, “Khartoum.” Indeed, his subtlety presented a marked contrast to Laurence Olivier’s heavily madeup villain, the fanatical Mahdi, who suggests an early, hammier version of Osama bin Laden. The movie was only moderately successful at the box office, but it now seems more timely and relevant than ever.

“Will Penny,” an eccentric 1968 Western written and directed by Tom Gries, gave Heston another chance to demonstrate his ability as a character actor. He played an aging, illiterate cowboy whose attempts to maintain a loner lifestyle are thwarted by Donald Pleasence and his homicidal gang. The movie proved to be even less popular than “Khartoum,” though it may have paved the way for the 1969 Western revival led by “The Wild Bunch” and “True Grit.”

Heston’s second film with Schaffner, “Planet of the Apes,” hit the jackpot in 1968. Even critics who had seldom warmed to Heston found positive things to say about his performance as an astronaut who finds himself stranded and enslaved on a planet run by apes. Pauline Kael, who called it “one of the most entertaining science-fiction fantasies ever to come out of Hollywood,” noted that it “wouldn’t be so forceful or so funny if it weren’t for the use of Charlton Heston in the role.”

“Apes” kicked off a series of apocalyptic sci-fi movies starring Heston, including “The Omega Man” (1971), which echoes the doomsday finale of “Planet of the Apes,” and “Soylent Green” (1973), a glum drama about overpopulation. Heston also appeared in the first of the “Apes” sequels, “Beneath the Planet of the Apes,” and in an uncredited part in Tim Burton’s logic-defying 2001 remake of “Planet of the Apes.”

Like most stars, he also turned up in the disaster epics of the 1970s, including “Airport 75,” “Skyjacked,” “Earthquake” and “Two-Minute Warning.” He turned down “The Omen” but accepted another horror movie, “The Awakening,” that had considerably less impact. Playing the sinister Cardinal Richelieu in “The Three Musketeers” and “The Four Musketeers,” he found unexpected humor in the part.

Philosophical about his career
In the 1980s, Heston went back to television, making a surprisingly loose and wry appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” and playing the leads in more television remakes of the classics: Sir Thomas More in “A Man For All Seasons” and Long John Silver in “Treasure Island.” In the 1990s, he became an all-purpose authority figure, literally playing God in Paul Hogan’s “Almost an Angel” — and the head of the CIA in James Cameron’s Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick, “True Lies.”

“I need a guy who can plausibly intimidate Arnold,” said Cameron when he told Heston why he wanted him in the picture.

Heston also worked with his writer-director son, Fraser Clarke Heston, on such scenic theatrical films as “Mother Lode,” “Alaska” and “The Mountain Men.” (Fraser made his movie debut as the baby Moses in “The Ten Commandments.”)

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“Fraser was originally very bitter about the cuts that were made (on ‘Mountain Men’) and wanted to have nothing to do with the picture,” Heston once said. “But I pointed out to him that film is the only art form in which the artist can’t afford the raw materials he works with. Someone has to pay.”

He was just as philosophical about his own 1973 version of “Antony and Cleopatra,” for which he couldn’t find a distributor. He took the film with him to Boston and Chicago and overseas, and once said he was willing to show up with a print to show almost anywhere.

“It’s like the old joke about the guy calling up the theater to ask when the movie starts — and the theater manager asks, ‘When can you get here?’”

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