US: Charles Bronson, the poker-faced actor who became a screen star in his 50s by playing quiet, iron-willed vigilantes with nothing to lose, has died in a Los Angeles hospital.
He had Alzheimer's disease, and was reported to be 81. Bronson, laconic and leathery, once described himself as resembling "a rock quarry that someone has dynamited".
An unlikely movie hero, he spent years in obscurity before becoming one of the most popular film personalities of the 1970s and 1980s in the Death Wish series and violent revenge dramas such as Mr Majestyk.
It was not unusual for audiences to applaud wildly as Bronson, whose characters only sought solitude, was pushed by larger forces into hunting down street punks, organised crime figures, corrupt landowners and other scum of society.
In reaction to tales of urban violence, "one-man wrecking crew" movies found a wide audience, most notably with Clint Eastwood as "Dirty Harry" Callahan. But where Callahan used one-liner "make-my-day" wit before disposing of his enemies, Bronson's characters coolly dispatched their nemeses without much talk. Bronson, who rose from dire poverty to become one of the world's most recognised and wealthiest stars, 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.
He said he believed in his characters' basic, uncomplicated integrity and winced at more nuanced portrayals. "When you see weakness in a hero, you are doing something to his identity," he once told The Washington Post: "You take something away from the kids, the next generation, you steal away giving them anything to look up to."
Bronson was a coal-miner, onion picker and short-order cook before stumbling into acting after the second World War. After brief stage training, he entered films, usually as a heavy or a secondary character. He got his first role, in You're in the Army Now (1951), by convincing the director 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.
After making a greater impression in European productions, including Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), he 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 plays 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. Bronson received critical drubbings for many of these parts, but he was not fazed. Critics, he said, never pay to see films anyway.
In interviews, he came across as resentful of those he deemed media darlings, largely actors with intensive stage training. "They're all too busy trying to stretch something out of nothing," he told The Post in 1977.
"I can play the character better because of my experience - because of the things I've been through. All those Method guys - like that De Niro, Stallone and what's his name, Pacino - they're all the same. They even look the same."
Bronson was born Charles Buchinsky, the eleventh of 15 children born to Russian-Lithuanian immigrants. He grew up in a coal-mining community near Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania. His father died of cancer when Bronson was 10. He worked in a coal mine, and spent time in jail for stealing food to feed his family.
His 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 wife, Kim Weeks Bronson, and six children.