For other persons named Charles Bronson, see Charles Bronson (disambiguation).
Charles Bronson (born Charles Dennis Buchinsky, Lithuanian name Karolis Bučinskis, November 3, 1921 – August 30, 2003) was an American actor known for "tough guy" roles who starred in such classic films as Once Upon a Time in the West, The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen, The Great Escape and the Death Wish series. In many of his roles, he played a police detective, western gunfighter, boxer, vigilante or Mafia hitman.
Bronson was born in the notorious Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania coal-mining neighborhood of Scooptown in the Pittsburgh Tri-State area. He was the 11th of 15 children born to a Lithuanian Tatar immigrant father and a Lithuanian-American mother. His father was from the Lithuanian town of Druskininkai. Bronson's father died when he was only 10, and he went to work in the coal mines like his older brothers until he was drafted for World War II. He earned $1 per ton of coal mined. His family was so poor that, at one time, he reportedly had to wear his sister's dress to school because he had nothing else to wear.
In 1943, Bronson joined the United States Army Air Forces and served as an aircraft gunner in the 760th Flexible Gunnery Training Squadron, and in 1945 as a B-29 Superfortress crewman with the 39th Bombardment Group based on Guam. He was awarded a Purple Heart for wounds inflicted during his service.
After the war, he decided to pursue acting, not from love of it, but rather because he was impressed with the amount of money that he might be able to make. Bronson was a roommate of Jack Klugman, another struggling actor at the time. Klugman later said of Bronson that he was good at ironing clothes.
Bronson's first movie role – an uncredited one – was as a sailor in You're in the Navy Now in 1951. Other early screen appearances were in Pat and Mike, Miss Sadie Thompson and House of Wax (as Vincent Price's henchman Igor). In 1952, Bronson boxed in a ring with Roy Rogers in Rogers' show Knockout.
In 1954, during the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) proceedings, he changed his surname from Buchinsky to Bronson as Eastern European names sounded suspicious in an era of anti-Soviet sentiment. He took his inspiration from the Bronson Gate at Paramount Studios, situated on the corner of Melrose Avenue and Bronson Street.
Bronson made several appearances on television in the 1950s and 1960s, including leading roles in three episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: And So Died Riabouchinska (1956), There Was an Old Woman (1956), and The Woman Who Wanted to Live (1962). He also starred alongside Elizabeth Montgomery in The Twilight Zone episode "Two" (1961) and played a killer named Crego in Gunsmoke (1956).
Many of his filmographies incorrectly state that he appeared in the 1958 Gary Cooper film Ten North Frederick, which was not the case.
In 1958 he was first cast as the lead, in the Machine-Gun Kelly, a low-budget, albeit well received, gangster film.
Bronson also scored the lead in his own ABC's detective series Man With A Camera (from 1958 to 1960), where he portrayed Mike Kovac, a former combat photographer freelancing in New York City. Frequently, Kovac was involved in dangerous assignments for the New York Police Department.
Charles Bronson gained attention in 1960 with his role in John Sturges' western The Magnificent Seven (1960), where he played one of seven gunfighters taking up the cause of the defenseless. Two years later, Sturges cast him for another popular Hollywood production The Great Escape as a claustrophobic Polish prisoner of war nicknamed "The Tunnel King" (coincidentally, Bronson was really claustrophobic because of his childhood work in a mine).
In 1961 he was nominated for an Emmy Award for his supporting role in a TV episode with the title Memory in White.
Again on the ABC network, Bronson was noted in 1963 in the role of Linc, the stubborn wagonmaster in the TV western The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, where he starred together with a twelve-year-old Kurt Russell.
In The Dirty Dozen (1967) Bronson played an Army death row convict conscripted into a suicide mission. Bronson's characters had a penchant for "surviving" in this and other violent "buddy" pictures.
Although he began his career in the United States, Bronson first made a serious name for himself 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 a "monstre sacré" ("holy monster").
In 1968 he played in the Once Upon a Time in the West epic. The director, Sergio Leone, once called him "the greatest actor I ever worked with", and originally wanted Bronson for all three movies now known as the Man with No Name trilogy. Bronson turned him down each time and the roles instead launched Clint Eastwood to film stardom.
Even though he was not yet a headliner in America in 1970, he helped the French film Rider on the Rain win a Hollywood's Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The following year, this overseas fame earned him a special Golden Globe Henrietta Award for "World Film Favorite - Male" together with Sean Connery. This was the most prestitigious of the few awards he ever received. At the time, the actor wondered if he was "too masculine" to ever become a star in the United States.
One of Bronson's most memorable roles came when he was over the age of 50, in Death Wish (1974), the most popular film of his long association with director Michael Winner. He played Paul Kersey, a successful New York architect, a liberal until his wife (played by Hope Lange) is murdered and his daughter raped. Kersey becomes 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, Bronson recommended that people not imitate his character. This successful movie spawned sequels over the next 20 years, in which Bronson also starred. His great nephew, Justin Bronson, was scheduled to star in a remake of Death Wish in 2008.
For Walter Hill's Hard Times (1975), he played a Depression-era street fighter making his living in illegal bare-knuckled matches in Louisiana.
He was considered to play the role of Snake Plissken in Escape from New York (1981), but director John Carpenter thought he was too tough looking and too old for the part, and decided to cast Kurt Russell instead. Between the 1976 and 1994, Bronson starred in numerous films made by smaller production companies, most notably Cannon Films. Many of them were directed by J. Lee Thompson, a cooperation that Bronson valued. Ultra-violent films such as The Evil That Men Do and 10 To Midnight were blasted by critics, but provided him with good-paying work throughout the 80s. Bronson's last starring role in a theatrically released film was 1994's Death Wish V: The Face of Death.
Charles Bronson became very popular in Japan in the early 1990s with the bushy eyebrowed TV critic Yodogawa Nagaharu ("Sayonara, sayonara, sayonara!") hosting 1-2 seasons of his films every year on NTV, one of the main TV channels in Japan.
Bronson was married to British actress Jill Ireland from 1968 until her death from breast cancer at age 54 in 1990. He had met her when she was married to British actor David McCallum. At the time, Bronson (who shared the screen with McCallum in The Great Escape) reportedly told him, "I'm going to marry your wife." Two years later, Bronson did just that. She was his second wife.
On August 30, 2003 Bronson died of pneumonia while suffering from Alzheimer's disease at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA. He had been in poor health since undergoing hip replacement surgery in August 1998. He is buried in Brownsville, Vermont, near his home of thirty years in West Windsor.
A tribute to him was at the end of Kill Bill: Volume 2 credits, which say "R.I.P. Charles Bronson".
