It is conventional to say of movie stars that they are very private people, but Bronson has contructed a privacy so complete that it seems out of keeping with his occupation as a performer. He exudes an aura of privacy; I did not feel like approaching him. He sat at the head of a table with his wife of six years, Jill Ireland, at his left hand. Their children ranged around them: three by Jill's previous marriage to David McCallum, two from Bronson's first marriage, and their daughter, a perfect little blonde born in 1971.

Bronson finally sighed and handed his daughter to his wife. He came to be interviewed, after all. He does not mean to be difficult, but it is in his nature. He does not volunteer information, does not elaborate, and has no theories about his films ("I'm only a product like a cake of soap, to be sold as well as possible").

To make everything harder, Time magazine had printed a hostile review only that week of Bronson's latest movie, "The Stone Killer." The writer, Jay Cocks, dismissed it as another "Charles Bronson-Michael Winner picture." To Bronson, that was a personal attack. "First it was a novel, then it was a screenplay, and there was a cinematographer involved and a lot of other people. That makes it personal, when he picks on just two people, and that gets me mad." An ominous pause "One way or another," he said, "sooner or later, l'll get that man. Not physically, but I'll get him."

There is that about Charles Bronson, and it is unsettling. He really does seem to possess the capacity for violence. It is there in his eyes, and in his muscular forearms, and in the way he walks. Other actors can seem violent in their roles; Lee Marvin, certainly, and Robert Mitchum and Clint Eastwood. But they don't seem violent in person. Bronson does. Maybe that's because he has been there, and violence isn't strange to him: back when he was Charles Buchinsky from the coalfields of Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania, he did time twice, once for assault and battery and once for robbing a store. There were hard times early on in Ehrenfeld, and in the Air Corps, and working in mob gambling joints in Atlantic City. Director Michael Winner once told me: "After we've been on a picture a few weeks, the crew starts coming around and asking, When does it happen? When does he blow up? Actually I've never seen him blow up. But he seems to contain such a capacity for it that people tend to brace for it."