Profile of Paul Kersey on Famous Like Me

Paul Kersey is the central character in the Death Wish novels and movies, which follow Kersey's crime-fighting activities beginning in the early 1970's and continuing for the next twenty years.

Brian Garfield is the author of the original novel Death Wish, in which the character of Kersey is introduced. In this book he is an architect in his forties and a political liberal who turns to vigilantism to avenge the death of his wife at the hands of a gang of muggers. The sequel, Death Sentence, describes Kersey's attempts to deal with a copycat vigilante while at the same time continuing his war against petty criminals.

The movie series, beginning with the original Death Wish and continuing through four (increasingly absurd and unlikely) sequels, features a middle-aged (and later, elderly) Kersey, portrayed by Charles Bronson. The Kersey of the movies also starts out as a liberal and an architect, a man who disliked violence so much that he registered with the U.S. Army as a conscientious objector during the Korean War. In the movies, those close to Kersey are constantly being raped and/or killed, providing Kersey with ever-fresh reasons to resume vigilantism. In the later movies Kersey's architect work is seldom mentioned, and he seems to have taken up full-time work as a one-man mercenary squad. As the years pass Kersey's former abhorrence for violence and liberal views are never discussed, and his skill with firearms and other impromptu means of death-dealing has increased exponentially. During the final movie sequel, Kersey (now a senior citizen) dispatches large numbers of hardened criminals with laughable and cold-blooded ease.

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