Charles Bronson

Born: 3 November 1921
Where: Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania, USA
Died: 30 August 2003

Perhaps the biggest late bloomer in Hollywood history, Bronson never got the marquee treatment he deserved until his late forties. He was already 53 when Death Wish came out.

The Hollywood great - dubbed Il Brutto (The Ugly One) in Italy - was prosaic about his looks.

"I guess I look like a rock quarry that someone has dynamited," he once said.

The miner-turned-movie star always defended the action-packed, crowd-pleasing Death Wish series, but the films were criticised for their violence, exacerbated by copycat killers.

Death Wish 3 was filmed several months after New Yorker Bernard Goetz shot four men whom he said had accosted him on a subway, and found himself dubbed the Death Wish Vigilante by the tabloids.

In a 1987 interview, Bronson said of the films: "I think they provide satisfaction for people who are victimised by crime and look in vain for authorities to protect them. But I don't think people try to imitate that kind of thing."

Bronson was born Charles Bunckinsky on November 3, 1921 in Pennsylvania, the 11th of 15 children born to a coal miner and his wife, both Lithuanian immigrants.

Bronson himself worked as a miner after graduating high school and it was only going into the army in World War II that got him out of the mines.

After the war he learned acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, and his first film role was in 1950 playing a sailor in You're in the Navy Now, starring Gary Cooper.

The name Bronson is said to taken from the Bronson Gate at Paramount Studios, at the north end of Bronson Avenue.

He made more than 60 films and some of his credits are among the film industry's most enduring movies - The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen.

In 1972, he was named the biggest box office star by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and, in 1979, he received the Gold Star Award as the film industry's top international star.

Bronson, called a gentle person by friends, also starred in Mr Majestyk, played an Israeli general in television's Raid on Entebbe, and appeared in the Eighties films Borderline, Death Hunt and From Ten to Midnight.

His first marriage was to Harriet Tendler, whom he met when they were both struggling actors in Philadelphia. They had two children before divorcing.

In 1966, he married actress Jill Ireland who, when they met, was married to British actor David McCallum.

She died in 1990 from breast cancer, after which he married his third and final wife, Kim.

Bronson, father to six children, died on 30 August 2003 of pneumonia.

He reportedly had Alzheimer's disease and had been in hospital since suffering serious organ failure earlier in the month.