I bought the Sunday Chronicle specifically for Charlton Heston, because I wanted to read his obit by long-time Associated Press entertainment writer Bob Thomas. I was quite disappointed. Heston was a special actor, and played many parts in addition to the standard gloss on his career that the AP obit followed blindly in the best pack journalism style.

At the time of greatest box office power, Heston ranked right up there with John Wayne as a legendary American actor. But Heston was not content to portray the Ben Hurs, Michelangelos and El Cids of the world.

Instead he took off in new and different directions. When you have already portrayed Moses at the age of 32 and President Andrew Jackson at a mere 29, the thrill of being a historical figure has a tendency to fade.

His other, different films went unmentioned in the AP obit, which left me puzzled. Famous people’s obits are given form and substance months and years before they die, to be topped off when their lives end. Such a shallow effort by AP, and in a major newspaper like the Chronicle. Mick LaSalle, have you taken a buyout? That thought passed through my mind as I recalled all the special moments that Heston’s exceptional career has brought to this movie buff.

Shameful omissions in the AP obituary of some of Heston’s most different and wide-ranging roles included the films, The Omega Man, Touch of Evil, Soylent Green, Number One, The Big Country and Major Dundee. It might also might have been worth mentioning that he played an ape in an uncredited cameo in the 2001 Tim Burton reimagining of the 1968 Planet of the Apes. And that brief cameo was better than nearly everything else in one of Burton’s directorial misfires.

For those who have not seen any of the aforementioned Heston vehicles, in Omega Man (1971), he is the original Will Smith in I Am Legend. Touch of Evil (1958), finds Heston being directed by Orson Welles and cast as a forthright Mexican (!) detective. Another 1958 effort and one of my personal favorites, The Big Country had Heston playing ranch foreman Steve Leach. His outdoor fight with Gregory Peck and his passionate kiss of Carol Baker are both great moments in this William Wyler-directed big-screen Western melodrama. The very next film Heston did with Wyler was Ben Hur, by the way.

Soylent Green (1973) was another dystopian sci-fi epic about a vastly overpopulated and ecologically damaged Earth with the famous concluding line, Soylent Green is people! Number One (1969) had Heston cast as an aging quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, a role loosely based on the final years of Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle with the N.Y. Giants. It’s in no way a big film, but just shows the range of roles Heston was willing to assay at that period in his career.

In 1965, after El Cid but before mega-hit Planet of the Apes, Heston worked for the only time with maverick director Sam Peckinpah on Major Dundee. Heston had the lead role as Major Amos Dundee, the commander of a mixed force of Union and Confederate cavalry that pursued a raiding band of Apaches into Mexico. When Peckinpah was nearly fired in a dispute with the studio, Heston put his considerable prestige on the line and stood up for Peckinpah. Without Heston’s support, the film may never have been finished, and Peckinpah may not have gone on to make The Wild Bunch, where many of the themes in Dundee were fully realized.

As a moviegoer for more than 50 years, I am indebted to Heston for his grand portrayals of so many historical figures, but equally so for his work in other movies that rounded out a very special career. I do not care about his gun advocacy and NRA presidency toward the end of his life. What he did in his movies towers above the political passions of the moment.

Now more than ever his words in 1959 as Ben Hur to evil Roman centurion Messala resound through the decades. Boyhood friend Messala was trying to get Judah Ben Hur to rat out his Jewish insurgent friends who were opposing the military occupation of Judea. In words eerily reminiscent of a United States president, Messala’s final argument was, Either you are for me or against me. In that case, Ben Hur concludes, I am against you. That was a powerful lesson for a mere teenager, and events of recent years have made me think that some political leaders of my generation either never saw nor understood the subtext of Ben Hur.

Heston’s upstanding moral subtext remained strong throughout his life, and he was never content to rest on his considerable laurels. For me that was the true measure of the man, and he ranks with Jimmy Stewart and Gregory Peck as a true master of his craft, and deserving of every movie lover’s gratitude and appreciation for an imposing and noble career.