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For some screwy reason I thought that if I didn’t hit him, I wouldn’t get in trouble. Harriett said he never liked to talk publicly about his wartime exploits, although Paul Talbot’s 2015 book Bronson’s Loose Again! On the Set with Charles Bronson, included the revelation that Bronson got into serious trouble while training with the 760th Flexible Gunnery Training Squadron in Kingman, Arizona, when a sergeant started a fight with him. The youngster who “used to stand on street corners with a milk bottle in my hand waiting to rob someone” found a purpose. What is beyond doubt is that being drafted into the army in 1943 turned his life around. He claimed to have been in jail twice, although D’Ambrosio could find no prison record, and avouched that he’d once been shot by a police officer on a freight train, claiming he was unharmed because “the bullet fell right out.” His flights of fancy remained after he became famous. “His brothers joked a lot about Charlie’s poor made-up misfortunes.” “That story of Charlie wearing dresses is absolutely ridiculous,” said Bronson’s first wife Harriett Tendler. He sometimes claimed he could not speak English at high school, that he was sold to travellers by his mother Mary, and that, most famously, he was forced to attend school in his sister’s clothing. “I’ve never gotten the smell of coal out of my nostrils,” he lamented.īrian D’Ambrosio, who wrote the 2001 biography Menacing Face Worth Millions: A Life of Charles Bronson, said that after becoming famous, the “dissembling” actor promoted myths about his childhood to fool “gullible journalists”. A legacy of labouring on his knees in pitch blackness was headaches and claustrophobia. He always spoke bitterly about these six years of “back-breaking” work, which left him with “unsightly hands” and permanent scars on his legs and torso. 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.
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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.