It was the actor’s first major success starring in a movie aimed at American audiences.īut the breakout role that established his box office appeal in the U.S. The way he looked, and his Scooptown-accented diction, brought a credibility, at times even a bleak grandeur, to his best roles that most of today's pretty boys can only pretend to.The same year marked the release of “The Valachi Papers,” an Italian-made film in which Bronson played Mafia informer Joseph Valachi. Bronson was one of the last American film actors whose rough, unhandsome face actually spoke of experiences beyond a movie set. One of his favorite hobbies was painting. Her death preceded his, and they had six children. He married actress Jill Ireland, who co-starred in a number of his films, notably Assassination (1987), where he is a Secret Service guard to her presidential First Lady. He began the hard climb playing minor hoodlums and Indian chiefs. Somehow he hustled his way to California and enrolled at the Hollywood-prone Pasadena Playhouse. He claimed to have been a B-29 tail gunner in the Pacific, but actually drove a food delivery truck in Arizona. He might have stayed a miner except for a second world war draft. At l6, Bronson went to work in the coal mines, where he was paid one dollar for each ton of coal he dug.
A nice life for Charles Buchinsky, the 11th in a desperately poor Russian Lithuanian family of 15 children growing up in Scooptown, Pennsylvania. The coal miner's son bought a 36-room Bel Air mountaintop mansion and a 260-acre estate in Vermont. Again, in 1971, he packed foreign cinemas with Red Sun almost never seen in the States.įrom then on, Bronson prospered even as critics either ignored or assailed him. Against type, he even clumsily played a "beatnik" artist in a great bad movie, Elizabeth Taylor's weepy The Sandpiper (1965), with Richard Burton.īut Bronson was not "bankable" until the French actor Alain Delon invited him to star in Adieu, L'Ami (1968) which grossed $6m in France alone.Įuropean audiences went wild for him, though the picture never was released in the US. Until Death Wish, which inaugurated for him and Hollywood an ugly era of mean and dirty violence, Bronson had carved out a niche as a tough, trim character actor in such films as The Dirty Dozen (1967) and The Battle Of The Bulge (1965). In a strange, remarkably imaginative western, The White Buffalo (1977), a sort of dream film, Bronson was completely in tune with the lyrical atmosphere. In the right hands, as in Mr Majestyk (1974), he could be a wonderfully appealing working-class hero.
Bronson looked like a homeless drifter, talked as if he had just got off a boat full of immigrants, and - like Mitchum - moved like the bar-room brawler he often played. However, worldwide audiences could not get enough of his lined, leathery face. Part of Bronson's problem was that he looked wrong, spoke wrong and appeared in all the wrong movies to impress the critics. This is a dark, accurate view of the lumpen working class life which Bronson, a coal miner's son, brought bleakly and brilliantly to life. In Hard Times, Bronson superbly played a hoboing 'pick up' prizefighter who, though scarred by age, punches his heart out to save his gambling manager, James Coburn, from a savage Mob beating.
The Mechanic, which most critics hated as disgustingly violent, is in fact a cold, cold-hearted and meticulous study of male (homo?) sexuality dramatised in the ambiguous relationship of Bronson, a sybaritic professional killer, and his would-be apprentice and son-figure, Jan-Michael Vincent. Bronson was shatteringly effective in the low budget Machine Gun Kelly (l958) - and wholly memorable in two under-rated Hollywood films, The Mechanic (1972) and Hard Times (1975). And he greased up to play more native American warriors - in Drum Beat (1954), Jubal (1956), Chato's Land (1971), etc - than Iron Eyes Cody.īut along the way he got better and better - not unlike Burt Lancaster, who also started out with a physique but little acting talent. His first lucky break was in You're In The Navy Now (1951) because he could belch on cue. Michael Winner's Death Wish (1974), when Bronson played a father seeking revenge for the rape-murder of his wife and daughter, helped make Bronson an international star.īut he got there the hard way.
It would surprise both his ardent fans outside the United States (where most of them are) and his many American detractors to hear Charles Bronson called a great actor.īut if we accept that film acting is fundamentally different from the theatre, and that a camera-wise if dramatically untutored screen star may have a more deeply emotional impact than an Olivier or an Ashcroft, then a place may be reserved in the cinematic Pantheon for Bronson.