Charles Bronson, 1921 - 2003: Coal miner struck Hollywood gold

Charles Bronson, the poker-faced actor who became a screen star in his 50s by playing quiet, iron-willed vigilantes with nothing to lose, died of pneumonia Saturday in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 81.

Mr. Bronson, laconic and leathery, once described himself as resembling "a rock quarry that someone has dynamited." An unlikely movie hero, the former coal miner spent years in obscurity before becoming one of the most popular film stars in the 1970s and 1980s in the "Death Wish" series and violent revenge dramas such as "Mr. Majestyk."

It was not unusual for theatergoers to applaud wildly as the characters Mr. Bronson played were pushed by larger forces into hunting down street punks, organized-crime figures, corrupt landowners and other societal scum.

Mr. Bronson, who rose from dire poverty to become one of the world's most recognized and wealthiest stars, said he identified with lone-man roles. He shunned the Hollywood party circuit, held film critics and most actors in disdain and liked to showcase himself as an antidote to the sensitive, self-doubting 1970s male.

In a 1971 interview, Mr. Bronson theorized on why the journey had taken him so long: "Maybe I'm too masculine. Casting directors cast in their own, or an idealized, image. Maybe I don't look like anybody's ideal."

He was born Charles Buchinsky on Nov. 3, 1921, in Ehrenfeld, Pa. He was the 11th of 15 children of a coal miner and his wife, both Lithuanian immigrants.

Young Charles learned the art of survival in the tough district of Scooptown, "where you had nothing to lose because you lost it already." The Buchinskys lived crowded in a shack, the children wearing hand-me-downs from older siblings. At the age of 6, Charles was embarrassed to attend school in his sister's dress.

Charles' father died when he was 10, and at 16 Charles followed his brothers into the mines. He was paid $1 per ton of coal and volunteered for perilous jobs because the pay was better. Like other toughs in Scooptown, he raised some hell and landed in jail for assault and robbery.

He might have stayed in the mines his whole life if it weren't for World War II.

Drafted in 1943, he served with the Air Force in the Pacific. Having seen the outside world, he vowed not to return to the squalor of Scooptown.

He was attracted to acting not, he claimed, because of any artistic urge; he was impressed by the money that movie stars could earn. He got his first movie role, in "You're in the Army Now" (1951), by convincing the director that he could burp on cue.

Featured roles in such action films as "The Magnificent Seven" (1960), "The Great Escape" (1963), "Battle of the Bulge" (1965) and "The Dirty Dozen" (1967) brought him accolades as a quietly forceful screen personality.

Stardom, however, eluded Mr. Bronson until his late 40s, when he went to Europe to co-star as Alain Delon's tough American soldier-of-fortune partner in the 1968 thriller "Adieu l'Ami" ("Farewell Friend"). The film became a major hit in France.

Mr. Bronson followed it up the same year, playing a mysterious drifter in the Sergio Leone Western "Once Upon a Time in the West," which turned him into a top star in Europe. A string of other European-made films followed.

The Italians called him "Il Bruto" — the Ugly One. In France, where he had become the No. 1 box-office draw, he was known as "Le Sacre Monstre" — the Holy Monster.

And in Spain, the rough-hewn Mr. Bronson was named No. 1 male sex symbol, edging out the charismatic bullfighter El Cordobes.

Mr. Bronson came to full promise as a film star in the early 1970s after signing with producer Dino De Laurentiis.

Under De Laurentiis, he headlined three films that, cumulatively, made more than $150 million: "The Valachi Papers," in which he played an aging mob informer; "The Stone Killer," as a police detective; and "Death Wish," as an architect who hunts down the thugs who murdered his wife and raped his daughter.

In 1974, Michael Winner, the British director of Mr. Bronson in "Death Wish," "The Mechanic" and "The Stone Killer," offered his view of the actor's on-screen appeal to The New York Times.

"The key to Bronson is the repressed fury, the constant feeling that if you don't watch the screen every minute, you'll miss the eruption," Winner said. "But coupled with the intense masculine dynamism, there's also a great tenderness in Bronson. Women respond sexually to that combination of danger and tenderness in him."

As for Mr. Bronson?

"Don't ask me to explain a mystique," he told The New York Times in 1974. "I'm just enjoying all this while it lasts. I'm basically doing the same thing I was doing 20 years ago."

Mr. Bronson's first marriage, to Harriet Tendler, ended in divorce.

He was married to actress Jill Ireland from 1968 until her death in 1990. They co-starred in such films as "The Mechanic," "Hard Times," "Breakheart Pass" and "Assassination."

Survivors include his third wife, Kim Weeks Bronson, and six children.

Compiled from reports by The Washington Post, The Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times.