Charles Arthur Salvador, better known as Charles Bronson, is a British criminal, with a violent and notorious life as a prisoner. He has spent periods detained in the Rampton, Broadmoor, and Ashworth high-security psychiatric hospitals.
Age
Charles Bronson was born on 6 December 1952. He is 70 years old.
Wife
Salvador proposed to actress Paula Williamson, during a prison visit on 13 February 2017, and was accepted. She had been visiting him for five months. According to Williamson: “Charlie is a changed man. It is my hope that he will be released by my 40th birthday, in August 2020”. Williamson, who had minor roles in Coronation Street and Emmerdale, married Salvador in the prison chapel on 14 November 2017.
It became known in July 2018 that Bronson asked for a divorce after photo evidence of a young British holiday goer ‘motorboating’ on her chest and inviting him and his friends to her apartment, whilst on holiday in Tenerife, was leaked to a newspaper. She claimed he requested his wife to wear a catsuit when she next visited him, a suggestion she rejected. On 29 July 2019, Williamson, aged 38, was found dead at her home in Stoke-on-Trent. Her death was not considered suspicious by the police.
Children
Michael Jonathan Peterson is the only known son of the UK’s most violent prisoner Charles Bronson.
Conviction
First arrested as a petty criminal, he was convicted and sentenced in 1974 to seven years imprisonment for armed robbery. Further sentences were imposed because of attacks on prisoners and guards. Upon his release in 1987, he began a bare-knuckle boxing career in the East End of London. His promoter thought he needed a more suitable name and suggested he change it to Charles Bronson, after the American actor. He was returned to prison in 1988 on conviction concerning another robbery. He is a violent prisoner and has taken numerous hostages in the course of confrontations with guards, resulting in sentences of life imprisonment. He has been held at times in each of England’s three special psychiatric hospitals.
Bronson has been featured in books, interviews, and studies of prison reform and treatment. He has said: “I’m a nice guy, but sometimes I lose all my senses and become nasty. That doesn’t make me evil, just confused.” He was the subject of the 2008 film Bronson starring Tom Hardy, a biopic based loosely on his life.
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