Charles Bronson dies, aged 81, after screen career as outcast and gunslinger

With an impassive face, seemingly chiselled from a quarry, and a hand never far from the trigger of an automatic, Charles Bronson was among the big screen's quintessential tough guys. As tributes poured in yesterday after his death at the age of 81, he was remembered for his brooding, macho presence as an actor, his oddly self-deprecating sense of humour and the extraordinary - even tasteless - violence of his movie output.

Bronson died over the weekend at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, with his third wife, Kim, at his bedside. His health had deteriorated sharply over the past few weeks after a long struggle with Alzheimer's disease.

The son of a Pennsylvania coal miner, Bronson fell into acting after the Second World War as an escape from his grim working-class background. From the start, he was pegged to play criminals, outcasts and gunslingers. Without the looks to qualify as a leading man - an Italian newspaper nicknamed him "Il Brutto", the ugly one - he seemed destined to languish in smaller character parts.

A trio of films - The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen - nevertheless captured audiences' imaginations, especially in Europe. Alain Delon invited him to France to co-star in Adieu L'Ami (1968), and Sergio Leone cast him in a career-defining role in Once Upon a Time in the West.

Bronson so encapsulated the strong, silent type that it sometimes seemed whole hours would pass without him saying a word. An episode of The Simpsons once spoofed him by imagining a town called Bronson, Missouri, whose inhabitants stood menacingly in doorways and broke their silence only to say such words as: "It ain't over."

Stardom belatedly came in the United States with Michael Winner's notorious Death Wish (1974), about a mild-mannered New York architect who becomes a one-man vigilante to avenge his murdered family. The Los Angeles Times wrote at the time that it was "a despicable motion picture which seems certain to make a lot of money". To which Bronson responded: "We don't make movies for critics, since they don't pay to see them anyhow."

His subsequent output was in much the same vein - eminently forgettable B-movies with names such as Love And Bullets, Death Hunt and Messenger of Death. Clearly more interested in the money than in artistic respect - Bronson and his second wife, the British actress Jill Ireland, lived in a 31-room mansion in Bel Air - he admitted he would never go to see the sort of film he appeared in. "I'm not a fan of myself."

Bronson was born Charles Buchinski - a name indicating his Lithuanian lineage. He adopted Bronson after the name of a gate at Paramount Studios in Hollywood.

Michael Winner yesterday praised him as a "very, very good actor", even if his range was limited. Bronson once offered a more sober assessment: "Some day I'd like a part where I can lean my elbow against a mantelpiece and have a cocktail."

It was not to be.