His father died when he was eleven years old, and he joined his brothers in the coal mines after his graduation from South Fork High School in 1940.īronson was liberated from the marginal living conditions of Ehrenfeld and the dust and claustrophobic circumstances of the coal mines by the World War II military draft in 1943. Family members later changed their name to “Buchinsky.” Bronson grew up in Ehrenfeld, a dreary company town in southwestern Pennsylvania run by the Pennsylvania Coal and Coke Company, and attended public schools there and in nearby South Fork. His mother, also of Russian descent, was born in Tamaqua in eastern Pennsylvania. His father was an ethnic Russian who immigrated to the United States from Lithuania. He finally achieved stardom in his own country in 1974 as the New York architect-turned-vigilante in Death Wish.īronson was born Charles Dennis Bunchinsky, the eleventh of fifteen children of Walter Bunchinsky, a coal miner, and Mary (Valinsky) Bunchinsky, a homemaker. 30 August 2003 in Los Angeles, California), actor who played mostly character roles in Hollywood before finding success as a lead in European films in the late 1960s.
3 November 1921 in Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania d.
