Charlton Heston had a profile and a stalwart self-confidence

While other American film stars of the 1950s, '60s and '70s wrestled with their characters' internal demons on screen, Charlton Heston represented another sort of hero, the kind that only unclenched his jaw — a jaw tailor-made for clenching — when the script demanded it. Even when he was young, acting in contemporary material, Heston seemed like an emissary from an earlier era, a rock-solid throwback in his declamatory approach to acting, standing up to external circumstances of biblical proportion.

The star of "The Ten Commandments" (1956) and "Ben-Hur" (1959) died last week at age 84. Leaving aside matters of politics and Heston's longtime association with the National Rifle Association, what sort of actor was he, really?

No troubling minor chords for Heston: This was a major-chord actor, with a profile and a stalwart self-confidence mainstream audiences believed in.

There were occasional exceptions to the rule, such as the melancholy "Will Penny" (1968), which Heston judged to be his finest, most nuanced work on screen. A decade earlier the fabulously lurid "Touch of Evil" (1958) found Heston, coming off "The Ten Commandments," in collaboration with co-star and director Orson Welles.

"I probably learned more about acting from Welles than any other film director I've worked for," Heston said. Heston's place in the deliriously rich thriller is, undeniably, a bit of fun, partly at the expense of the star's righteous image. Playing a Mexican narcotics cop with darkened skin and not a trace of an accent, he exists in "Touch of Evil" as a symbol of ramrod nobility confronted by one bucket of sleaze after another.

Any major star of impressive longevity must make peace with a certain amount of schlock. Those of us who first got to know Heston in '70s disaster movies writ small ("Skyjacked," 1972) or larger, at least budgetarily ("Earthquake," 1974), had to play a little catch-up. He seemed in those pictures to be an action man grimacing his way through a crisis. By the late Nixon era Heston's granite resolve was something of an anachronism, even though his marquee value proved surprisingly hardy.

Just a few years prior, however, in the original "Planet of the Apes" (1968), Heston is wholly effective. The entire film is. The star serves the material like a pro, and when he seethes, "Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!" he does not come off like Kirk Douglas on an off day.

Heston would've made a fine matinee idol in the silent days. In fact, when Heston was 17, he starred in a Chicago-made amateur 16mm version of Henrik Ibsen's "Peer Gynt." (The first few minutes of this silent 1941 oddity, which is available in its entirety on DVD, can be found on YouTube.com). Youthful, certainly, subtle, no, but you can see why directors gave him a chance: Even in these touchingly primitive confines there's a spark in his eyes.

You can see the same spark five decades later in director Kenneth Branagh's 1996 version of "Hamlet." It's a small scene but it's a pleasure to see the actor so obviously juiced simply to be there, wrapping his voice around Shakespeare's poetry. Even in "Hamlet" Heston's presence evokes a bygone theatrical era. The actor who displayed little interest in shadowy psychology (there's a reason we don't associate Heston with film noir) is playing a trouper who does not traffic in modern, Hamletlike crises. The old lion is a bulwark against modernity. And for much of his screen career, so was Heston.

On March 24, we lost Richard Widmark, an actor we treasure for his contradictions: the steely gaze and the manic, toothy grin, his unique mixture of vulnerability and instability, his refusal to ennoble lowlifes and authority figures of all kinds. Charlton Heston's appeal always was less complicated. His voice, that jaw, those iconic, larger-than-life roles bespoke nobility. And for much of the 20th century, on a chariot or painting the Sistine Chapel in "The Agony and the Ecstasy," audiences felt comfortable in Heston's hands.