![]() By 16 he was already toiling down the mines, earning one dollar for every ton of coal he dug. This desolate coal camp, known by locals as ‘Scooptown’, was where Bronson, the 11th of 15 children, grew up. His Lithuanian father Valteris died when he was only 10, killed by “black lung” poisoning after years down the mines in Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania. The actor born Charles Dennis Buchinsky, on November 3 1921, had a tough upbringing. It’s unsurprising that when Aberystwyth-born Michael Gordon Peterson, AKA “Britain’s most notorious prison hard man”, chose a new name in 1987, he picked Charles Bronson. As a youngster, Bronson threatened strangers with a bottle before robbing them, as a soldier he broke a sergeant’s arm during a brawl and he once choked a director after a disagreement over how a scene should be played. Despite his sophistication – Bronson loved to relax by creating oil paintings or making clay sculptures – he lived up to director Ingmar Bergman’s description of him as “a man whose face is etched in violence”. Perhaps he was protesting a little too much. “I feel like I’m seeing myself through one of those mirrors at a carnival – long, grotesque images,” he said in 1977. When Charles Bronson was the highest-paid actor on the planet, earning nearly £2 million per film after his hit role as the Death Wish vigilante, he bemoaned his enduring image as a volatile, brutal character. ![]()
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