Charles Bronson

Charles Bronson (born November 3, 1921, Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died August 30, 2003, Los Angeles, California) was an American motion-picture and television actor who was best known for his portrayal of tough guys.

Bronson was one of 15 children of a Lithuanian coal miner and became a miner himself at age 16. He served in the U.S. Army Air Forces as an aircraft gunner during World War II. After the war he held a series of odd jobs before being hired by a Philadelphia theatre company to paint scenery. That eventually led to small acting parts, and in 1949 he moved to California.

Bronson made his big-screen debut in You’re in the Navy Now (1951), and over the next few years he had small, sometimes uncredited, roles in several movies and television shows. The leathery-faced muscular actor was played bigger parts in such B-films as Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), Apache (1954), and Drum Beat (1954). His first movie credit using the name Bronson was in Big House, U.S.A. (1955). He played the title role in Machine Gun Kelly (1958) and appeared in several television series, even starring in the short-lived Man with a Camera (1958–60). More memorable film roles followed in The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), The Dirty Dozen (1967).

A series of European-made westerns and crime movies—including Once upon a Time in the West (1968) and Rider on the Rain (1970)—made Bronson famous in Europe, and he earned an honorary Golden Globe Award in 1972 as a “world film favorite.” After returning to Hollywood, he starred in crime thrillers including The Mechanic (1972), The Stone Killer (1973), and Mr. Majestyk (1974). Bronson then appeared in perhaps his best-known film, Death Wish (1974), portraying an architect who becomes a vigilante following the murder of his wife and rape of his daughter. Although the film was criticized for its violence, it established Bronson as a major star in the United States, and four sequels to the movie followed, with the final one appearing in 1994 (his last theatrical film).

In 1976 Bronson won critical praise as an aging boxer in Hard Times, set during the Great Depression. Many of his later films were action-thrillers, including Love and Bullets (1979), The Evil That Men Do (1984), and Murphy’s Law (1986). In other movies he revealed humanity and tenderness beneath the toughness, as in Sean Penn’s The Indian Runner (1991) and the TV movie Yes Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus (1991).