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Charlton Heston, whose turns in epics including The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur reset the leading-man standard in Hollywood and who later won all of our hearts as the president of the National Rifle Association, died Saturday in Beverly Hills. He was 83. A family spokesman declined to specify a cause of death, but Heston had been suffering from "symptoms similar to those of Alzheimer's disease" since 2002.

The 1950s belonged to Heston, an Evanston, Ill., native whose early roles as historical figures like Marc Antony (Julius Caesar) and Buffalo Bill (Pony Express) presaged more massive-scale work for directors Cecil B. DemIlle (The Greatest Show on Earth, The Ten Commandments) and William Wyler, who directed Heston to an Oscar in 1959's Ben-Hur. Heston notably (if unconvincingly) portrayed a Mexican narcotics detective in Orson Welles' noir classic Touch of Evil, moving on a decade later to the campy sci-fi allegories Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973).

Despite stirring bit turns in Wayne's World 2 and the 2001 Apes remake, Heston's stint as the president of the National Rifle Association was perhaps his defining accomplishment of the last decade; waving a musket you could "pry from my cold, dead hands," his 2000 speech to his NRA constituency provoked Michael Moore's humiliating Heston-estate visit in Bowling For Columbine, among Heston's last and least-auspicious screen appearances. We at Defamer prefer to remember the better times, which is why we bring you a trailer for one of the underrated gems in the Heston oeuvre. Rest in peace, Chuck.