Some actors disappear into their roles.

The characters played by Charlton Heston disappeared into him. He was a commanding, virile figure who could part the Red Sea, drive a mean chariot, tussle with talking apes or put on an eye patch and play the CIA director in "True Lies."

"Why me?" Heston asked James Cameron, the movie's director. "I need someone who can plausibly intimidate Arnold Schwarzenegger," Cameron replied. Heston countered, "If I can intimidate the Pharaoh of Egypt, I can intimidate Arnold."

Heston, 84, died Saturday at his Beverly Hills home.

Always a fan of his film work although not his conservative politics -- Easter Saturday wouldn't be the same without Moses raising his staff in "The Ten Commandments" -- I gained a renewed appreciation watching "The Omega Man" in December. It was to prepare for the Will Smith movie "I Am Legend."

Those movies, along with "The Last Man on Earth" starring Vincent Price, were all based on Richard Matheson's short novel, "I Am Legend." In each movie, the star spends long stretches alone -- no one to act against or with -- and nothing tests a performer's mettle like that.

I talked with Heston just once, in the fall of 1998 as part of a teleconference he did for "Charlton Heston's Hollywood: 50 Years in American Film." He had collaborated with Jean-Pierre Isbouts on the 223-page book, which has 200 photos along with some very fine sketches done by Heston.

The book allowed Heston to speak for himself on everything from "Ben-Hur" mania to serving as head of the Screen Actors Guild and having breakfast with the Rev. Martin Luther King to discuss all-white film crews and a planned march on Washington, D.C.

An organizing meeting attracted the likes of Burt Lancaster, James Garner, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte.

"At a meeting at my house, Marlon [Brando] insisted, 'We should chain ourselves to the Lincoln Memorial ... or lie down in front of the White House and block Pennsylvania Avenue.'

"I said as leader of the group, 'No, Marlon, we won't do that. We live in a country where we have the right to assemble peaceably in redress of grievances. That's the way we are going to do it or I'm not going.' That's the way we did it," he recalled in his book, in a way that summoned the voice of Moses.

He won the Academy Award not for "Ten Commandments" (wasn't even nominated) but for "Ben-Hur." He had arrived at the ceremony at the same time as fellow nominee Jimmy Stewart and the two posed for photos together.

"As we finally turned to go to our seats, Jimmy took my arm. 'I hope you win, Chuck,' he said. 'I really mean that.' I don't know of any other actor who could have said such a thing, let alone mean it," Heston wrote. He had a premonition that he won minutes before Susan Hayward opened the envelope bearing his name.

During that telephone interview, Heston fielded questions from a handful of newspaper reporters on everything from Shakespeare and "Touch of Evil" to his leadership of the National Rifle Association.

"I've had the great good fortune to play presidents and generals and geniuses and tyrants, kings and cardinals and those are interesting men," he said. "The Shakespearean films I've done mean the most because they're the best parts, of course, and they're kind of the measuring sticks against which you measure an actor's work."

He credited "Planet of the Apes" with launching a new genre of film, claimed he never tired of people calling him Moses, said he once exhibited and sold his artwork but decided to draw just for the love of it, disclosed he had started keeping journals in the mid-1950s and insisted he never lost work or friends because of the NRA.

But he seemed to bristle or stiffen at that last question.

This was four years before his August 2002 disclosure that he had symptoms consistent with Alzheimer's disease. In that announcement, he said he was "neither giving up nor giving in," but his work immediately slowed and then stopped.

Heston had appeared flustered and, for a once-robust man, fragile in Michael Moore's documentary "Bowling for Columbine" when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2002. Whether you agreed or disagreed with Heston about gun ownership, it was a sad sight.

By the time the movie opened in Pittsburgh on Nov. 1, it had been three months since Heston's health disclosure and that scene had lost its intended sting.

But the Heston most of us will remember -- holding the Ten Commandments aloft, arm muscles straining as he steered a chariot in a race that ran nine minutes, spitting out the line "Get your stinking paws off me you damned dirty ape" -- will overshadow his debate with Moore.

As Heston said on the phone that day, making a movie is not fun. "It isn't supposed to be fun for us, it's supposed to be fun for you guys looking at it."

It was and still is.