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Ireland died of cancer in 1990, and, in 1998, Bronson married another actor, Kim Weeks. She brought two sons from her first marriage, to David McCallum Bronson and Ireland had a daughter, and their adopted son died in 1989. In 1968, he married the actor 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. There he began the hard climb, playing minor hoodlums and Indian chiefs.īronson's first marriage, to Harriet Tendler, produced two children and ended in divorce. Somehow, painting scenery led to small acting parts, and 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 delivery truck in Arizona. He might have stayed there except for a second world war draft. At l6, Bronson went to work in the mines, where he was paid $1 for each ton of coal he dug.
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The coalminer's son bought a 33-room Bel Air mountaintop mansion and a 260-acre estate in Vermont - a nice life for Charles Buchinsky, the 11th in a desperately poor Russian-Lithuanian family of 15 children, born in the Scooptown district of Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania. Again, in 1971, he packed foreign cinemas with Red Sun (Soleil Rouge).įrom then on, Bronson prospered, even as critics ignored or assailed him. That year also saw him in Sergio Leone's tribute to a vanishing genre, Once Upon A Time In The West, where his unblinkingly studied performance as a harmonica-playing Mexican peasant bent on revenge is highlighted by Ennio Morricone's haunting score. Against type, he even clumsily played a beatnik artist in Elizabeth Taylor's weepy The Sandpiper (1965), with Richard Burton.īut Bronson was not bankable until the French actor Alain Delon invited him to co-star as an American mercenary in the thriller Adieu, L'Ami (1968), which grossed $6m in France alone. Until Death Wish, which inaugurated for him and Hollywood an ugly era of mean and dirty violence, he had carved out a niche as a tough, trim character actor in such films as The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and The Battle Of The Bulge (1965). In a strange, remarkably imaginative western, The White Buffalo (1977), he 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. As he put it himself: "I guess I look like a rock quarry that someone has dynamited." He looked like a homeless drifter, talked as if he had just got off an immigrants' boat, and moved like the bar-room brawler he often played. Part of Bronson's problem was that he looked wrong, spoke wrong and appeared in all the wrong movies to impress the critics - even though cinema audiences could not get enough of his leathery face. It was a dark, accurate view of the lumpen working-class life that Bronson, a coalminer's son, brought bleakly and brilliantly to life.
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In Hard Times, he superbly played an ageing prizefighter punching valiantly to save his gambling manager, James Coburn, from a Mob beating.
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#CHARLES BRONSON DEATH WISH PROFESSIONAL#
The Mechanic, which most critics hated as disgustingly violent, is in fact a cold-hearted, 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. But along the way he got better and better, not unlike Burt Lancaster, who also started out with a physique but little acting talent.īronson was shatteringly effective in the low-budget Machine Gun Kelly (l958), and memorable in two under-rated 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. His first break was in You're In The Navy Now (1951), because he could belch on cue. Michael Winner's Death Wish (1974), in which he played a father seeking revenge for the murder of his wife and rape of his daughter, helped make Bronson an international star. But if we accept that a camera-wise, if dramatically untutored, screen star may have a more deeply emotional impact - and stir even more complex emotions on a mass scale - than an Olivier or an Ashcroft, then a place may be reserved in the cinematic pantheon for him. It would surprise both his fans outside the United States (where most of them are) and his many American detractors to hear Charles Bronson, who has died of pneumonia aged 81, called a great actor.