Among the smorgasbord of genre-film delights on view in William Holden: A Different Kind of Hero, a 20-film tribute to the actor beginning today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, are five Westerns, a paradigmatic prize-fighting picture, four war films, and Billy Wilder’s oft-quoted film-buff 101 cult classic “Sunset Boulevard.” And the timing is perfect: A midsummer-film fortnight that includes David Lean’s “Bridge on the River Kwai,” Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch,” George Seaton’s marvelous World War II spy picture “The Counterfeit Traitor,” Joshua Logan’s overripe hothouse flower of 1950s Americana, “Picnic,” and a rare screening of John Sturges’s crackerjack horse opera “Escape From Fort Bravo” seems tailor-made for the July heat and blockbuster-season doldrums.

And yet, by rights, any tribute to Holden (1918-81) should really be undertaken after Labor Day. Whether playing leader, lover, loner, or martyr, Holden’s performances invariably bear an end-of-the-season autumnal sadness.

Holden shared the screen with such iconic American leading men as John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart, and the star easily held his own alongside the deliberate on-screen gravity of the former and the brittle cynicism of the latter. Yet of all of the male stars of his generation, Holden embodied the anxious doubts and sometimes outright lies that are the dark underpinnings of movie heroism. Looking over the list of films chosen by Film Society’s estimable programmer, Kent Jones, it’s interesting to consider how many of the pictures involve Holden’s character defrauding those around him, and how many climax (or, in the case of “Boulevard,” open) with his death.

From the start, Holden and Hollywood were an uneasy fit. Born William Franklin Beedle Jr., in 1918, he was re-christened William Holden by a Paramount publicist who was concerned that the 20-year-old Pasadena chemistry student’s surname evoked insects, not American star power. But in truth, the Beedles traced their patrician roots back to pre-Revolutionary America, and England before that. Holden’s starring debut, in Rouben Mamoulian’s sanitized version of Clifford Odets’s “Golden Boy,” proved so contentious in the making that if co-star Barbara Stanwyck had not gone to bat for her leading man, the notoriously confrontational front-office tyrant of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, would have fired him. Nearly 40 years later, during the 1978 Academy Awards broadcast, Holden, at the dais to present a technical award, went off the teleprompter to thank Stanwyck, who was present in the audience that night, for saving his career at its inception.

Certainly, Holden’s sturdy, muscular build, gamely set jaw, and rich, gravelly baritone voice were part and parcel of his evolving charisma. But aside from the beefcake, Holden’s eyes held the flickering light of an overtaxed conscience, and his straight back and high forehead (an accidental blow to which ended the star’s life in 1981 at 63) bore the weight of an intimate knowledge of his character’s ethical and personal limits. As he aged on-screen through four decades in film, Holden came to embody the twilight of Hollywood movie machismo, and with it, a postwar America stripped of illusions and aching for a second chance to relive the innocent summers of yore.

Through the 1940s and ’50s, Holden played dozens of cowboys, suit-and-tie family men, adventurers, and lovers. In his early films, his fictional personalities romanced their own narcissism as much as they pursued their scripted love interests. By the time of his impromptu Oscar-night tribute to his first co-star, Holden had made ever fewer romantic revisits to these stock types. Via Sidney Lumet’s “Network” and Clint Eastwood’s “Breezy,” he gamely explored the desperate vanity of insecure middle age. In Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch,” the star shared uncomfortable truths about the dubious value of outliving one’s glory days. Similarly, with Holden in key roles, Wilder’s “Fedora” and Blake Edwards’s “S.O.B.” lent a dramatic context to the love-hate attachment the actor held for big-screen fame and Hollywood paychecks.

By the time Holden died in 1981, personal indifference to acting had yielded to a particular fascination with African wildlife conservation. Unfortunately, what had been youthful carousing had also given way to binge drinking. The fatal fall that ended his life was due to a drunken misstep during a solo bout with the bottle in his bedroom. “To be killed by a vodka bottle and a night table,” Wilder reasoned at the time. “What a lousy fade-out to a great guy.”

Reeking as it does of the cruel ironies of Hollywood Babylon-style excess, as well as the private agony of someone who perhaps never found personal fulfillment in plying his craft to equal the considerable skill with which he practiced it, Holden’s lonesome, wasteful death was an awful tragedy. But decades later, it seems perversely fitting that a man who specialized in uneasy on-screen personae — vanquished by their own weaknesses and pitiless circumstance — was himself brought low by a single wrong move during one of many lost weekends.

“They came too late and stayed too long,” observed the tagline introducing Peckinpah’s “Wild Bunch.” Having arrived at the dawn of a new fatalism in American movies, and inadvertently bowed out as the ’70s and the age of the anti-hero ended, Holden’s tragic timing was perfect both on-screen and off.

Through July 15 (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, at Broadway at West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).