Charles Bronson
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Charles Bronson (born Charles Dennis Buchinsky; November 3, 1921 – August 30, 2003) was an American actor, known for his roles in action films and his granite features and brawny physique. Born into extreme poverty in Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town in the Allegheny Mountains, Bronson's father, a miner, died when he was young. Bronson also worked in the mines until he joined the United States Army Air Forces in 1943 to fight in World War II. After his service, he joined a theatrical troupe and studied acting. During the 1950s, he played various supporting roles in motion pictures and television, including anthology drama TV series in which he appeared as the main character. Near the end of the decade, he had his first cinematic leading role in Machine-Gun Kelly (1958).
Bronson had substantial co-starring roles in The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), This Property Is Condemned (1966), and The Dirty Dozen (1967). He also appeared in numerous major television shows and received an Emmy Award nomination for his supporting role in an episode of "General Electric Theater". Actor Alain Delon, a fan of Bronson, hired him to co-star in the French film Adieu l'ami (1968). That year, he also starred in one of the leading roles in the Italian spaghetti Western, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Bronson continued to take on leading roles in various action, Western, and war films produced in Europe, including Rider on the Rain (1970), which won a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. During this period, Bronson was the most popular American actor in Europe.
After this period, he returned to the United States to make more films, working with director Michael Winner. Their early collaborations included Chato's Land (1972), The Mechanic (1972) and The Stone Killer (1973). At this point, he became the world's top box-office star, commanding a salary of $1 million per film. In 1974, Bronson starred in the controversial film Death Wish (also directed by Winner), about an architect turned vigilante, a role that typified most of the characters he played for the rest of his career. Most critics initially panned the film as exploitative, but the movie was a major box-office success and spawned Death Wish and four sequels.
Until his retirement in the late 1990s, Bronson almost exclusively played lead roles in action-oriented films, such as Mr. Majestyk (1974), Hard Times (1975), St. Ives (1976) (1976), The White Buffalo (1977), Telefon (1977), and Assassination (1987). During this time, he often collaborated with director J. Lee Thompson. He also made a number of non-action television films in which he acted against type. His last significant role in cinema was a supporting one in a dramatic film, The Indian Runner (1991); reviewers praised his performance.
Personal life
Character and personality
Bronson was scarred by his early deprivation and struggles as an actor. A 1973 newspaper profile stated that he was so shy and introverted he could not watch his own films. Bronson was described as "still suspicious, still holding grudges, still despising interviews, still hating to give anything of himself, still unable to believe it has really happened to him." He was embittered that it took so long for him to be recognized in the U.S., and after achieving fame, he refused to work for a notable director who had snubbed him years earlier.
Critic Roger Ebert wrote in 1974 that Bronson does not volunteer information, does not elaborate, and has no theories about his films. He noted that Bronson threatened to "get" Time magazine critic Jay Cocks, who had written a negative review that Bronson viewed as a personal attack. Unlike other actors who projected violence on screen, Bronson seemed violent in real life.
Early life and war service
Bronson was born on November 3, 1921, in Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania, a coal mining region in the Allegheny Mountains, north of Johnstown. He was the eleventh of fifteen children born into a Roman Catholic family of Lithuanian descent. This very large family slept in shifts in their cold-water shack. The coal car tracks that ran from the mine's mouth passed just a few yards away. His father, Walter Buchinsky (né Vladislavas Valteris Paulius Bučinskas/Bučinskis), was a Lipka Tatar from Druskininkai in southern Lithuania. Bronson's mother, Mary (née Valinsky), whose parents were from Lithuania, was born in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, in the Coal Region.
Bronson said that English was not spoken at home during his childhood, similar to many other first-generation American children he grew up with. He once recounted that even as a soldier, his accent was strong enough to make his comrades believe he was a foreigner. Besides English, he could speak Lithuanian and Russian.
In a 1973 interview, Bronson remarked that he did not know his father very well and was uncertain whether he loved or hated him, adding that all he could remember about his father was that whenever his mother announced his father was coming home, the children would hide. After his father died of cancer in 1933, Bronson went to work in the coal mines, initially in the mining office before transitioning to the mine. He later stated that he earned one dollar for each ton of coal he mined. In another interview, he mentioned that he had to work double shifts just to earn $1 (equivalent to $24 in 2024) a week. Bronson later recounted that he and his brother engaged in dangerous work removing "stumps" between the mines, noting that cave-ins were common.
The family endured severe poverty during the Great Depression, and Bronson recalled being hungry many times. His mother could not afford milk for his younger sister, so she was given warm tea instead. He mentioned that he had to wear his older sister's dress to school due to a lack of clothing. Bronson was the first member of his family to graduate from high school.
Bronson worked in the mines until he enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces in 1943 during World War II. He served in the 760th Flexible Gunnery Training Squadron and, in 1945, was a Boeing B-29 Superfortress aerial gunner with the Guam-based 61st Bombardment Squadron within the 39th Bombardment Group, which conducted combat missions against the Japanese home islands. He flew 25 missions and received a Purple Heart for wounds sustained in battle.
Marriages
His first marriage was to Harriet Tendler, whom he met while they were both fledgling actors in Philadelphia. They had two children, Suzanne and Tony, before divorcing in 1965. She was 18 years old when she met the 26-year-old Charlie Buchinsky at a Philadelphia acting school in 1947. Two years later, with the reluctant consent of her father, a prosperous Jewish dairy farmer, Tendler wed Buchinsky, a Catholic and former coal miner. Tendler supported them both as she and Charlie pursued their acting dreams. On their first date, he had just four cents in his pocket — and he later went on, now as Charles Bronson, to become one of the highest-paid actors in the country.
Bronson married English actress Jill Ireland from October 5, 1968, until she died in 1990. He met her in 1962 when she married Scottish actor David McCallum. At the time, Bronson, who had shared the screen with McCallum in The Great Escape, reportedly told him, "I'm going to marry your wife. " The Bronsons lived in a Bel-Air mansion with seven children: two from his previous marriage, three from hers (one of whom was adopted), and two of their own, Zuleika and Katrina, the latter also adopted. After they married, she frequently played his leading lady, and they starred in fifteen films together.
To maintain a close family, they would load everyone up and take them wherever filming took place so they could all be together. They spent time in a colonial farmhouse on 260 acres (1.1 km2) in West Windsor, Vermont, where Ireland raised horses and provided training for their daughter Zuleika to perform at higher levels of horse showing. The family frequently visited Snowmass, Colorado, in the 1980s and early 1990s for winter holidays.
On May 18, 1990, at the age of 54, Jill Ireland passed away after a long battle with breast cancer at their home in Malibu, California. In the 1991 television film Reason for Living: The Jill Ireland Story, Bronson was portrayed by actor Lance Henriksen. On December 27, 1998, Bronson married for the third time to Kim Weeks, an actress and former employee of Dove Audio who had helped record Ireland's audiobooks. The couple remained married until Bronson's death in 2003.
Filmography
- Wikipedia article: Charles Bronson Filmography
Career
- Wikipedia article: Charles Bronson Career
External links
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Charles_Bronson ]
Chat rooms • What links here • Copyright info • Contact information • Category:Root