Thanks to his young life as a child laborer, money and work were the backbone of everything he did - even acting. Bronson Was Considered To Be One Of The Best Paid Actors Of His Era He continued to act until he physically couldn’t do it anymore, with his final role occurring in 1999.
#Charles bronson series
By 1958 he was the lead in ABC's detective series Man with a Camera, and from there it was off to the races in terms of acting.
I was in something by Moliere - I don't even know what it was called.Īfter doing stage work he found small onscreen roles in films like House of Wax and You're in the Navy Now in the early ‘50s. I was living in my own mind, generating my own adrenaline. I hung around New York and did a little stock-company stuff I wasn't really sure at that time if l even wanted to be an actor. A friend took me to a play, and I thought I might as well try it myself. He explained: It seemed like an easy way to make money. According to Bronson, he didn’t see acting as a way to become a star, he just felt that it was a good way to make some money.
Would he go back to the coal mine? Or would he search for more lucrative work? Bronson worked as a onion picker in upstate New York, he was a baker in Philadelphia, and he took art classes while trying to act in New York City. He Got Into Acting After The WarĪfter coming home from the war, Bronson was faced with the stark reality of having to find a job. After flying 25 missions he was awarded a Purple Heart. While serving in the Air Force he was a part of the 760th Flexible Gunnery Training Squadron, and in 1945 as a Boeing B-29 Superfortress aerial gunner with the Guam-based 61st Bombardment Squadron. When I got into the service, people used to think I was from a foreign country. We were so jammed together we picked up each other's accents. In Ehrenfeld, we were all jammed together. He said: I was well fed, I was well dressed for the first time in my life, and I was able to improve my English. Not only was he getting out of the mines, but for the first time his life he was going to get three square meals and a place to sleep. It was pure work.īronson said that when his draft card was pulled in 1943 he was ecstatic. It wasn't a man on a dock with a forklift or any of that bullsh*t.
The miners felt bound together they knew how much they could get out, how much they could do. You spent one whole day preparing so you could spend the next day getting it out. He told Roger Ebert: When I worked, the rate was a dollar a ton. Not only was America feeling extremely patriotic throughout World War II, but Bronson absolutely hated working in the mines and he wanted to get out any way possible. It may sound strange, but Charles Bronson couldn’t wait to be drafted into the military. Charles Bronson was an American classic, pensive, private and stoic. Throughout his life, he never had the demeanor of an actor, he didn’t like to talk about himself and when he did talk about his process he seemed to consider it to be much more of a job than anything else. He also starred as Mike Kovac in Man With a Camera, which ran for two seasons (1958-60) on ABC. Before hitting the big screen, he was a regular on TV, having appeared in episodes of The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Have Gun Will Travel. Bronson only got out of the mines thanks to World War II.īronson became one of Hollywood's go-to tough guys in westerns and action movies, appearing in The Great Escape (1963), The Dirty Dozen (1967), Once Upon A Time In The West (1968), and Death Wish (1974), among many others. He didn’t just grow up as the son of a coal miner, he was a child who was a coal miner. So many actors throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s tried to exude a tough guy machismo, but Charles Bronson was the only guy was actually tough.
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