‘Hollywood was afraid’: Why was Charles Bronson forced to change his name mid-career?

It is known that Charles Bronson was a pseudonym that hid Charles Buczynski, who was born to a Lithuanian father and an American mother, and that the actor decided to change his name when his career was already well underway. And he made this decision for good reason.

Guest on set Stuart Rosenthal To promote Death Hunt in 1981, Bronson reverted to this radical change, even though he had already been touring under his real name for 5 years:

“I was encouraged to do this by two people”

“The reason I changed my name was because two people asked me to do it: my ex-wife and my agent. At that time, McCarthy was very popular. He was very popular and he was following the Communists. The Russian representative in the US was Vyshinsky, my name is Buchinsky, and they looked a lot alike.”

Andrei Vyshinsky was the Prosecutor General of the Moscow Trials organized by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, and McCarthy’s policies in the United States led to the formation of the United Nations Committee on American Activities, which was responsible for tracking communist sympathies in the United States. In 1947, this committee held 9 hearings against Hollywood employees. Bronson continues:

“Hollywood was scared and they wouldn’t hire anyone with the name Buchinsky, if you know what I mean. They were scared that it might be targeted, put on the radar of McCarthyism. So I said to myself, ‘Who cares, I’m changing my name.’

in two westerns in the same year under two different names

This name change occurred in 1954, so that year the actor was still billed as Charles Buczynski in the Robert Aldrich western Vera Cruz, then made his first appearance as Charles Bronson in another western, Delmer Davies’ The Lone Eagle. Having become a star under this pseudonym, he never changed it.

The Committee on Un-American Activities would lead to the creation of a “blacklist,” a list of Hollywood employees suspected of communist sympathies, resulting in the end of some careers or the use of pseudonyms by these actors, writers, and directors to continue working discreetly.