Biography
Early life
Bronson was born as Charles Dennis Buchinskas in the notorious Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania coal mining neighborhood of Scooptown, near Pittsburgh, the eleventh of 15 children born to an American mother of Lithuanian extraction and a Lithuanian emigrant father.
His father died when Charles was young and Charles went down to mine coal like his older brothers until he was drafted. He earned $1/ton of coal mined.
His family was so poor that, at one time, he had reportedly been forced to wear his sister's dress to school because he had no other clothes.. This story has also been repeated in Celebrity Setbacks: 800 Stars who Overcame the Odds by Ed Lucaire and in an edition of Ripley's Believe It or Not!
In 1943, Bronson was drafted into the United States Army Air Corps and served as a tail gunner onboard B29 bombers.
Bronson was a descendant of the Lipka Tatars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which caused many people to think that he looked like a Chicano or Mexican-American who was a Mestizo (mixture of Spanish and Indian ancestry). Thus, due to his looks Bronson sometimes played characters who were Mexican or who were part-Indian.
Charles Bronson in a promotional still for Death Wish 3
Acting career
After the war, he decided to pursue acting, not from any love of the subject, but rather, because he was impressed with the amount of money that he could potentially make in the business. Bronson was roommates with Jack Klugman, another starving actor at the time. Klugman later said of Bronson that he was good at ironing clothes.
During the McCarthy hearings he changed his last name to Bronson as Slavic names were suspect. One of his earliest screen appearances under his new name was as Vincent Price's henchman in 1953 horror classic House of Wax.
Bronson made several appearances on television in the 1950s and 1960s, including three leading roles on Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the episodes "And So Died Riabouchinska" (1956), "There Was an Old Woman" (1956), and "The Woman Who Wanted to Live" (1962); he also stared alongside Elizabeth Montgomery in The Twilight Zone episode "Two" (1961).
From 1958 to 1960, Bronson starred in the ABC detective series Man With A Camera. Bronson portrayed Mike Kovac, a former combat photographer, free-lancing in New York City. Frequently, Bronson's character was involved in assignments for the Police Department, which frequently put Bronson's character in danger. A number of the series episodes, which were all in black and white, are now available on DVD.
Although he began his career in the United States, Bronson first made a serious name for himself acting in European films. He became quite famous on that continent, and was known by two nicknames: The Italians called him "Il Brutto" ("The Ugly One") and to the French he was known as "le monstre sacré", the "sacred monster".
Even though he was not yet a headliner in America, his overseas fame earned him a 1971 Golden Globe as the "Most Popular Actor in the World". That same year, he wondered if he was "too masculine" to ever become a star in the United States.
Bronson's most famous films include The Great Escape (1963), in which he played Danny Velinski, a prisoner of war nicknamed "The Tunnel King", and The Dirty Dozen, (1967) in which he played an Army death row convict conscripted into a World War II suicide mission.
In the westerns The Magnificent Seven (1960) and the Sergio Leone epic Once Upon a Time in the West, (1968) he played heroic gunfighters, taking up the cause of the defenseless. Sergio Leone once called him "the greatest actor I ever worked with". In Hard Times (1975), he played a street fighter making his living in illegal boxing matches in Louisiana.
He is also remembered for Death Wish (1974) which spawned several sequels (also starring Bronson), In Death Wish he played Paul Kersey, a successful New York architect, a liberal until his wife (played by Hope Lange) was murdered and his daughter raped. Kersey became a crime-fighting vigilante by night, a highly controversial role, as his executions were cheered by crime-weary audiences. After the famous 1984 case of Bernhard Goetz, the actor recommended that people not imitate his character.
Bronson was married to British actress Jill Ireland from 1968 until her death from breast cancer at age 54 in 1990. She was his second wife. He met her when she was still married to British actor David McCallum. At the time, Bronson (who shared the screen with McCallum in The Great Escape) reportedly told McCallum: "I'm going to marry your wife." Two years later, Bronson indeed married Jill, and they were very happy together until her death in 1990.
Bronson died of pneumonia while suffering from Alzheimer's disease at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, aged 81.
At the time of his death, he was survived by his wife Kim, four children, two stepchildren and two grandchildren. A stepson, Jason McCallum Bronson, preceded him in death after succumbing to a drug overdose in 1985.
With his death, Robert Vaughn is the only one of the seven main stars of The Magnificent Seven who is still alive, as of January 2006.
He was frequently spoofed on The Simpsons, both by name and by character.
Selected filmography
The People Against O'Hara (1951)
The Mob (1951)
The Marrying Kind (1952)
My Six Convicts (1952)
Pat and Mike (1952)
Battle Zone (1952)
House of Wax (1953)
Crime Wave (1954)
Apache (1954)
Vera Cruz (1954)
Jubal (1956)
The Magnificent Seven (1960)
Master of the World (1961)
X-15 (1961)
Kid Galahad (1962)
The Great Escape (1963)
Battle of the Bulge (1965)
This Property Is Condemned (1966)
The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Honor Among Thieves (1968)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Lola (1969)
The Family (1970)
Red Sun (1971)
The Mechanic (1972)
Chino (1974)
Mr. Majestyk (1974)
Death Wish (1974)
Breakout (1975)
Hard Times (1975)
St. Ives (1976)
Telefon (1977)
Borderline (1980)
Death Hunt (1981)
Death Wish II (1982)
Death Wish 3 (1985)
Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987)
The Indian Runner (1991)
Death Wish V: The Face of Death (1994)
