In later years, Heston's on-screen image increasingly played a supporting role to his off-screen politics.
But big-screen politics is not completely new, he pointed out, noting that decades ago John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson got movie studios to tack their ads onto previews.
It is not a coincidence that two Republicans, Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, have made the most successful leaps from screen to politics.
Ms. Osetinskaya "has put up a smoke screen of politics where there isnone," Mr. Afanasiev said of Vedomosti's editor.
It is now a given in fiction and on screen that politics is a world of dirty tricks, scandal and compromise.
"You can see that these independent film directors do have ideological concerns, that they have a social mission they need to accomplish with their films, speaking out or standing up for the underprivileged or marginal and exposing corruption," said Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, author of "Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film" and a professor at Oberlin College.
We rarely see split-screen moments in politics and it will be interesting to see what the voting public makes of it.
London newsstands are thick with confessional cris de coeur from stars of screens, sports and politics about the burdens of projecting mass appeal.
Think of politics on screen in recent years and a couple of names come to mind.
Put the two together and you have the powerful basic storyline that dominates mythology, fairytales, the Bible, TV and film – consider that the average American teenager has already seen 16,000 murders on the screen – and, of course, politics.
The other was the small screen: "Television brought the politics of stardom into the living room and celebrated the ordinary".Subsequent media innovations, whether it was home video that gives the audience control over where and when they watch, or the Internet, successively reduced the star's once-mythic scale.
