Wilson, a Democrat, was portrayed in the 2007 movie "Charlie Wilson's War" by actor Tom Hanks as a boozy womanizer who found his life's cause in helping mujahedeen freedom fighters in Afghanistan fight and eventually repel occupying Soviet forces.

On a less flattering side, the movie opens with Wilson in a hot tub in a Las Vegas hotel, flanked by two strippers who are high on cocaine. The U.S. Justice Department in 1980 investigated Wilson for possible drug use, but the probe came up empty.

Wilson served 12 consecutive terms in the House of Representatives, and was known as the "Liberal from Lufkin," the town in mostly conservative east Texas where he lived.

He had complained of chest pains on Wednesday and was pronounced dead when he arrived at Memorial Health System of East Texas in Lufkin, the hospital said in a statement.

Charlie Wilson was the kind of man who would declare on 60 Minutes: "I just love stickin' it to the Russians." The kind of man who would make a fact-finding trip through Pakistan, taking his then-girlfriend, a former Miss World USA, in tow through that Islamic country.

Then, when the Defense Intelligence Agency refused to ferry her, he was the kind who would use his position on the House Appropriations Committee to slash the funding for two DIA planes, and have them transferred to the national guard instead.

His House colleagues used to say Charlie Wilson was the only person they had ever met who could strut while sitting down. And, yet, he also managed to get elected 12 times from Lufkin, Texas--a town so socially conservative that it didn't vote to allow alcohol sales until 2006, which was 73 years after the rest of the country ended Prohibition.