In everyone’s great haste to make a big fucking deal about Britain’s most infamous inmate, Charles Bronson, we completely overlooked the man who is that inmate’s namesake- the hardass, 5’10” 170lb actor Charles Bronson (b. 1921 d. 2003). Though I’d recalled the man being in great shape in whatever cowboy movie I’d seen him in, it never occurred to me to investigate the man himself. Thus, you can imagine my surprise when i happened across this pic of Charles Bronson and his 70s gorgeous (that was an entirely different level of crazy hot, featuring perky-as-fuck C-cup tits and a hip-to-waist ratio that seems to have become aggressively unfashionable in the modern era) wife, Jill Ireland. And so you know, Jill Ireland would have laughed Sir Mix-A-Lot the fuck out of the club, since she was 5’7″, 126 pounds, and rocking a 37-23-37 body when she and Bronson were tearing up the cinema every season (they did fifteen films together before she died of breast cancer in 1990).
For most of us, if you know of Charles Bronson it’s from his Death Wish films (the first of which was based on the badass Brian Garfield novel of the same name), in which Bronson stars as an aging architect-turned-Punisher-style-vigilante after his wife is killed and daughter is put in a coma during a brutal New York City mugging. Bronson proceded to blow the buttcheecks off a couple dozen bad guys over the course of the movie, and a couple hundred more baddies over the course of the 20 years the five-film series went. Rather than being the hard-eyed, hard-bodied flint-eyed badass of his cowboy film past, Bronson played a “soft” upper middle class dude pushed to the limit by the shitbags with which New York was teeming at the time. He pulled it off so convincingly that we all forgot how insane, unbelievably, preposterously hard Chuck Bronson actually was a few years prior to that.
Born in 1921, the eleventh of fifteen children to a Pennsylvania coal miner, Bronson could not have had an easy childhood- those mines have produced some of the hardest people the world has seen over the last two hundred years, and Bronson’s dad was apparently meaner than the majority of them, which is like calling a boxer meaner than Mike Tyson clones deliberately infected with the rage virus and rabies. After learning to speak English as a teenager (they only spoke Russian and Lithuanian at home and in the mine), Bronson became the first person to graduate high school in his family while pulling double time in the mine and school (he worked in the mine from age ten onward).
Bronson worked the mine until enlisting in the Air Force in 1943, serving as a aerial gunner in a B-29 Superfortress on 25 combat flights. For those of you who are unaware of the giant brass balls this job took, Bronson had to stuff himself into a tiny tube and crawl down an unlit metal tunnel the exact width of a man so he could then stuff himself into a glass egg bristling with machine guns to fire at incoming fighter aircraft. Riding a luge down a radioactive rockslide while people in what amounts to flying motorcycles with guns strapped to them attempt to blast you out of assistance would be a fair comparison, though that scenario lacks the constant fear of catching fire and falling 40000 feet to your death at any time.
Needless to say, Bronson’s pedigree as a bad motherfucker is firmly established between his mine work and his 25 combat missions (he did receive a purple heart on at least one mission), but adding to that was the fact that Chuck Bronson trained constantly. That’s not to say he lifted, because Bronson was an amateur boxer who might have fought professionally under a pseudonym from time to time (his contemporaries Jack Palance and Robert Mitchum both did), and boxers at that time never lifted. Instead, they would occasionally lift heavy rocks for strength, then do massive amounts of calisthenics, rope jumping, and roadwork to be in top fighting shape.
Bronson learned to fight, as kids of the day often do, from his older brother. Chuck’s oldest brother Jack was apparently a monster barfighter, and at least one reputable source (author Tom Furhman) asserts that older brother Jack was none other than legendary boxer Jack Dempsey. Certainly, the two look similar, fought similarly, and were on some of the same film projects (Hard Times in particular), so it’s not outside of the realm of possibility- hell, their physiques were even similar.
If you’re concerned about the provenance of this not-widely-reported information, Tom Fuhrman recalls,
“my Grandma Buchinsky got sick and passed. Apparently age 78, she was married at age 14 and had 15 children. The family flew in from all over for the funeral preparation. Charlie Bronson flew in from Spain where he was filming, Once Upon A Time In The West, with Henry Fonda. The family was distributed between hotels, friends and family in the town of Portage, PA. We had stayed at my Uncle Walter and Aunt Janet’s house, but it was crowded. My Dad and my Uncle Dempsey decided to check into some local motel to accommodate more relatives in the family houses. Realize my Uncle Dempsey was Charlie’s older, tougher, brother. A devastating boxer and veteran of the European Theater in WW2. So they tossed me in the car and we pulled up on what looked like Bates Motel. A small office building, [and living quarters] for the owner on one end and what my Dad would call a, “Beer Garden”, on the other. If you don’t know, a beer garden is like a flat, cement, building, with neon signs in the window. A local watering hole that probably only served, beer or shot & beer. No one called it a, “Boiler Maker” in my family. So the place is a magnet for toothless miners, mill workers and the occasional farmer who had no family other than the dog in his truck. In modern times this motel would stir images of violence, drug trade and making snuff films” (Fuhrman).
Dempsey left home as a kid and fought in barrooms to earn money prior to becoming a boxer, which gave him the bareknuckle experience he seemed to have passed on to his alleged younger brother for use in the mines and bar, which then gave him the fighting style on display in films like Hard Times. As to the speculatory nature of this, you have to bear in mind this wasn’t the internet age, and people ate shit without having photographic evidence of having done so, as well as doing menial tasks like shitting without announcing the exact location of the shit and photographic evidence of that as well. In any event, Dempsey grew up in unbelievably poverty-stricken circumstances, though those circumstances were deliberately shrouded in mystery because Dempsey was embarrassed of his mean upbringing.
“Dempsey spent the next six or seven years in mining camps, saloons, brothels, hobo jungles, freight trains, flophouses, carnival grounds, and pool halls. At times, Dempsey went days without eating, and often the only possessions he owned could be found in a single ragged bindle he carried with him from town to town. Long before Dempsey met the amoral Kearns, the “Manassa Mauler” was living on the edge. At home in boxcars, bust towns, fleshpots, tenderloins, and cathouses, Dempsey spent more time on the wild side than can be expected for a man who eventually developed such a stellar reputation.”
“As heavyweight champion, Dempsey began hobnobbing with high society superstars, and he felt increasingly inadequate among the fine manners of the nouveau riche. Like something out of The Great Gatsby, Dempsey embarked on a program of reinvention, turning himself from the sullen hobo with an eighth-grade education and the grammar of a stevedore into a celebrity bon vivant. Part of that process involved recasting his colorful but sordid past. But that past exists independently of attempts to downplay it over the decades” (Acevedo).
Chuck’s fitness obsession wasn’t just the result of having the hardest upbringing in history, however- he genuinely enjoyed working out. When he was in the gym or training at home, Chuck’s routine consisted of everything from dumbbells to thousands of pushups between milk crates, hundreds of situps, squeezing a tennis ball for grip and forearm muscularity, running, rope skipping, cable machines, medicine balls, and of course a ton of heavy bag work, but Chuck’s favorite exercise was rope climbing. On set, his training was a bit different, but Chuck was apparently a fucking perpetual motion machine on set, doing “Pushups between milk crates, rope climbing from a rope hung in the alley, sit ups and running” (Fuhrman). He was also heavily into the isometric style of training popular at the time, like Charles Atlas’ dynamic tension system.
Costars said Bronson never stopped pumping up on set, lifting dumbbells whenever the cameras stopped rolling, and even his girlfriends and wives claimed Bronson was fucking obsessed with his muscles. Don’t allow yourself to think of him as Zyzz, though- this dude could actually move weight and fuck shit up- his workouts were just as old school manly as you can get, adding “horseback riding, motocross, swimming, knife throwing and shooting” to all of the other shit he did, making him much more of a Bruce Lee than a Brad Pitt sort of actor. And not unlike Bruce, Chuck’s diet was uncharacteristically restrictive for the era.
“He was always STRINGENT with food. Limited calories. At my Grandma’s funeral, during the filming of “Once Upon a Time in West”, Charlie mentioned loving the food in France, but practicing, “push aways”, because you have to limit intake to stay in shape. During that afternoon, he indulged in a piece of my Aunt Janet’s incredible cherry pie. One piece with his cup of Yuban coffee brewed in a porcelain pot” (Fuhrman).
So for those of you (and we are legion) who are champing at the bit to get back into the gym, maybe a change in perspective is what you need in order to fully embrace the situation in which we now find ourselves. You could get all Chuck Bronson on the deal and get to the point where you can leap moving cars, do one-arm pullups up the side of a moving train, and bang the hottest people on planet Earth just by virtue of a badass physique and enough swagger to make a real-life pimp look shy by comparison. When in Spain shooting Spartacus, weights and other training equipment were hard to come by, so Bronson and his costar Laurence Olivier simply did a Willy Strode-inspired workout prior to shooting, per Bronson’s direction- being a bad motherfucker seems to have a lot more to do with not having an off switch than how much you squat.
“On the set of the “Dirty Dozen”, football legend turned actor, Jim Brown, stated that he respected Charlie for not, ‘carrying on’ after hours and being a family man. He also stated, ‘He wouldn’t want to mess with Charlie.’ Charlie was amused since Jim was a world class athlete, 6’2” and 230lb. Jim replied, ‘The thing is, I could pound you into the ground one day and you’d be back the next to take me out.’ Charlie said, ‘Well, you’re right. I don’t give up’” (Fuhrman).
If you’re unfamiliar with Woody Strode or his workout, Woody Strode (1914-1994) was a mixed race (Black and First Peoples) American multi-sport superstar who was a decathlete, professional football player, WWII vet, and professional wrestler who married a Hawaiian princess before becoming an actor. Strode was considered one of the best-built human beings on the planet in the 1930s and was immortalized with a statue that was not displayed at the 1938 Olympics due to the fact he was black. The workout that built his ripped 6’3″ 205 pound physique was simple, and likely the one that inspired Herschell Walker’s routine- 1000 pushups, 1000 free squats, and 1000 situps every day (Alpha).
Strode’s workout was pretty obviously inspired by that of the Great Gama, which means Bronson’s was also at least partly inspired by traditional pehwani training methods as well. Strode claimed he put on twenty pounds of muscle with that routine while playing college football (their coach disallowed his athletes from lifting), and as a pro wrestler said he was stronger than every wrestler within forty pounds of him. Chuck seemed to be no different, although his strength failed him in an impromptu board-breaking competition on the set of Kid Galahad.
After the grips goaded Elvis into breaking a board to prove his karate prowess, Chuck was unimpressed, muttering, “Bullshit” as he walked away. The grips then brought out a board for the musclebound actor to break in return, and Chuck only succeeded in breaking the fuck out of his hand in the effort. The bad blood between the two likely faded about as slowly as the pain in Bronson’s busted hand, but the King apparently managed to impress everyone with both his fight skills and the fact he never flinched when a punch was thrown at him, and the former pro boxer who coached him for the fight, “Musty” Al Callahan, claimed Elvis would tear up a lot of boxers, Chuck included.
Bronson’s fame only happened to arrive when he was reaching middle age, and he claimed he was only well fed for the first time when he reached basic training for the army. As such, one could surmise that he never reached his full potential, as he was perpetually underfed and overworked. That constant state seemed to serve him well, though, and gave him the work ethic that enabled him act in over 68 films in his filmography in spite of the fact that even as a youth, he was craggy-faced, incredibly shy loner who could only speak broken English before entering the Army. Not only that, but it enabled him to boast one of the best physiques in Hollywood for over twenty years and to live to the ripe old age of 82 depsite the fact he spent his youth perpetually cold, hungry, and working.
“So there you have it. Heavy labor as a youth, a good introduction by a workshop into fitness and diet, Then boxing, running, sit ups, push ups between milk crates and rope climbing. Daily systemic activity, swimming, hiking, heavybag, speedbag, knife throwing, horseback riding. Then follow a stringent diet and choose your parents carefully. Think of being in shape as an act of daily choice, rather than chasing a goal. Train for life. Be a hard man or woman (Furman).
Sources:
Acevedo, Chris. Hard times: The mystery of the Jack Dempsey-Jess Willard fight. This Brutal Glory. 4 Jul 2018. Web. 26 Apr 2020. https://thisbrutalglory.com/2018/07/04/hard-times-the-mystery-of-the-jack-dempsey-jess-willard-fight/
Alpha Phi Alpha. Woody Strode: The Definition Of Alpha Phi Alpha Badass. Watch the Yard. Web. 26 Apr 2020. https://www.watchtheyard.com/alphas/woody-strode-an-alpha-phi-alpha-badass/
Furman, Tom. Boxing was the basis of fitness. Medium. 10 Feb 2020. Web. 21 Apr 2020. https://medium.com/@physicalstrategies/boxing-was-the-basis-of-fitness-788944838e84
Furman, Tom. Hard Times: How To Become Charles Bronson. Medium. 9 Jan 2019. Web. 21 Apr 2020. https://medium.com/@physicalstrategies/hard-times-how-to-become-charles-bronson-90a68645693b In 1967–68
Peterson, John E. The two Charles Bronsons. Transformetrics. 2009. Web. 26 Apr 2020. chrome-extension://eeoamaomfacmjfahcafjbflffklcfihk/app.html
Roberts, Jeremy. A face like an eroded cliff: Beyond the tough exterior of ‘Death Wish’ vigilante Charles Bronson. Medium. 23 Nov 2018. Web. 26 Apr 2020. https://medium.com/@jeremylr/a-face-like-an-eroded-cliff-beyond-the-tough-exterior-of-death-wish-vigilante-charles-bronson-1b0e0dcd26fa
Damn, that Hard Times fight scene was pretty brutal given the era of the film.
Yet another rockin article. Thanks Jamie
Thanks man! According to Tom Furman, the choreography in that fight was inspired in large part by the methods used by Jack Dempsey in his barroom brawl phase of his career. Check out Tom’s articles- they’re really cool insight into Dempsey and Chuck Bronson.