Read The Times review of Ben Hur

Charlton Heston played epic heroes. Moses, John the Baptist, El Cid, General Gordon and Michelangelo all sprang to life on screen via this muscular, lantern-jawed actor. He made his name by playing Ben-Hur, a role for which he won the best actor Oscar in 1959. He deserved it, if only for that astonishing re-creation of a chariot race at the Circus of Antioch.

Laurence Olivier once paid Heston a high compliment. At Olivier’s invitation, the two had starred together in a Broadway play, The Tumbler (1959). The show flopped, but Olivier was sufficiently impressed to say that Heston had the “equipment” to be the greatest American actor of his day. That promise was never quite fulfilled before the camera. The dignity which served him so well in theatrical roles such as Antony and Sir Thomas More made Heston appear a little unapproachable on film — not quite as interestingly flawed as Henry Fonda or Gary Cooper.

What Heston could convey, however, through a twitch of those patrician cheekbones, was authority. In roles where many actors would have been lost in a crowd of angry, spear-brandishing slaves, Heston stood tall. As the director James Cameron explained, when casting him in True Lies (1994), “I need you because you can plausibly intimidate Arnold Schwarzenegger”. Not many 70-year-olds could pull that off.

Politically, Heston was a rare creature in Hollywood, a town of often unthinking Democrats. He walked behind Martin Luther King in the march on Washington of 1963, and was president of the Screen Actors Guild for six terms during the Sixties.

But in the Eighties Heston switched his allegiance from the Democrats to the Republicans and in later years he became prominent for his ardent defence of Americans’ right to bear arms. From 1998 to 2003 he served as president and spokesman for the National Rifle Association, becoming the rugged public face of rigid opposition to gun control and, more broadly, of a distinctively American spirit of defiant self-reliance.

Two days before being elected president of the NRA, he launched his term with a stinging attack on President Clinton: “America doesn’t trust you with our 21-year-old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don’t trust you with our guns.” And in a rousing speech at the NRA’s convention in 2000 he spoke out against the Democratic presidential hopeful Al Gore, who, he said — while waving a musket above his head — would have to take his gun “from my cold, dead hands”.

In earlier years he had visited the troops in Vietnam and campaigned for his old friend Ronald Reagan during the 1984 election. He was asked to run for Senate in 1970 for the Republicans, but declined the offer.

Political correctitude was not his style, nor the modern American tendency to, as he put it, “extol the ordinary, enshrine the victim”. On screen he played enough eccentrics and prophets to believe in greatness. “Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, Thomas More and Richelieu, Mark Antony and Michelangelo, Moses and John the Baptist are not like everyone. They are extraordinary and they have shaped the world.”

Heston played countless saints and geniuses, but he had advantages: at 6ft 3in he dominated other actors. His broken nose, acquired in a school game of American football, gave him a profile. It made him, in William Wyler’s words, “the best imitation Jew in Hollywood”. There was a particular resemblance to Michelangelo’s statue of Moses in Rome — a likeness which was pointed out to Cecil B. DeMille when he was casting the part. More biblical parts followed, and after a number of these a certain saintliness began to rub off on the actor. Like James Stewart or Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston came to represent certain qualities — courage, moderation, responsibility, justice — which Americans claimed as their own.

Heston had no truck with hyphenated ethnic labels. Had he been forced to apply one to himself, it would have been “Scots-English American”, from his mother’s side of the family, a branch of the Fraser clan, but to everyone he was the archetypal American, and proud of it.

Charles Carter — known as “Chuck” — was born in No Man’s Land, a small settlement in the woods around Lake Michigan, in 1923 (some sources say 1924). Self-sufficiency was essential in this rural community, and he was a proficient shot with a rifle at an age when most boys were playing with wooden swords.