Yul Brynner

Yuliy Borisovich Briner was born on July 11, 1920, in Vladivostok, a port city in the Russian Far East that was then under the short-lived Far Eastern Republic during the chaos of the Russian Civil War ^[1]. His father, Boris Briner, was a mining engineer and businessman of Swiss and Russian descent whose own father, Jules Briner, had built a substantial trading firm in Vladivostok. His mother, Marousia Blagovidova, came from a family of the Russian intelligentsia and had trained as an actress and singer ^[2].

The family did not stay together. Boris Briner abandoned his wife and children for another woman when Yul was still small, and Marousia took Yul and his older sister Vera first to Harbin, a city in Manchuria with a large Russian emigre community, where the children attended a school run by the YMCA ^[1]. Around 1932 mother and children moved again, this time to Paris. There the teenage Brynner drifted into the world of Russian emigre nightclubs, playing guitar and singing Gypsy songs alongside performers such as Aliosha Dimitrievitch, an association he treasured for the rest of his life ^[3].

Paris also gave him the circus. Brynner worked as a trapeze apprentice with the Cirque d'Hiver until a serious fall ended that ambition and left him with lasting back pain ^[2]. Throughout his later fame he embellished these years freely, at various times claiming Mongolian, Japanese, or Romani ancestry and a birthplace on Sakhalin Island. The documented Yul Brynner facts, assembled largely by his son Rock Brynner in a family history, are more prosaic but no less remarkable than the legends he invented ^[4].

Brynner reached the United States in 1940, following his mother, who was ill with leukemia, and joining a touring theatrical company run by Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov and a celebrated teacher of acting ^[2]. He made his Broadway debut in 1941 in Chekhov's touring production of Twelfth Night. During the Second World War, his fluency in French and Russian earned him work as an announcer and commentator for the United States Office of War Information, broadcasting to occupied France ^[1].

His first substantial Broadway role came in 1946 opposite Mary Martin in the musical Lute Song, a part that won him praise and a Donaldson Award as a promising newcomer ^[2]. Film and the new medium of television followed: he appeared in the low-budget film noir Port of New York in 1949 and worked steadily at CBS as a television director in the late 1940s, one of the earliest examples of a performer moving between the two sides of the camera ^[5].

Everything changed in 1951. Mary Martin recommended him for the role of King Mongkut of Siam in a new Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I, opposite Gertrude Lawrence. Brynner shaved his head for the part, kept it shaved for the rest of his life, and turned the imperious, curious, doomed king into one of the defining performances of the American musical theatre. The show opened at the St. James Theatre in March 1951 and brought him the 1952 Tony Award for best featured actor in a musical ^[6].

Any account of Yul Brynner achievements begins with the King of Siam. When the 1956 film version of The King and I was made at Twentieth Century Fox, Brynner repeated the role opposite Deborah Kerr and won the Academy Award for best actor ^[1]. It is one of the rare cases in which a performer originated a musical role on Broadway, carried it to Hollywood, won the Oscar for it, and then returned to it on stage for decades. By the time of his final performance in 1985, Brynner had played the king 4,625 times, a figure he tracked with pride, and he received a special Tony Award that year honoring the achievement ^[6].

The year 1956 established him as a film star of the first rank. Besides The King and I, he appeared as Pharaoh Rameses II opposite Charlton Heston in Cecil B. DeMille's epic The Ten Commandments and as General Bounine in Anastasia with Ingrid Bergman ^[1]. Two years later he played Dmitri in the adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov. His bald head, athletic bearing, and accented, clipped delivery made him unlike any other leading man of the period, and directors cast him as kings, warriors, and outsiders of ambiguous origin ^[5].

In 1960 he led the cast of John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven, a Western remake of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, playing the black-clad gunfighter Chris Adams. The film became a touchstone of the genre, and Brynner returned to the character in the 1966 sequel Return of the Seven ^[1]. A further landmark came in 1973 with Michael Crichton's Westworld, in which Brynner played a robot gunslinger modeled visually on his Magnificent Seven costume. The performance, mechanical and relentless, is frequently cited as an ancestor of later science fiction killing machines and helped the modestly budgeted film become a commercial success ^[5].

Brynner's interests ran well past performance. He was a dedicated photographer who carried cameras onto his film sets for decades, shooting candid portraits of colleagues such as Ingrid Bergman, Frank Sinatra, and Sophia Loren. Collections of his photographs were later exhibited and published, and his daughter Victoria edited the volume Yul Brynner: Photographer in 1996 ^[7].

He also wrote. Deeply affected by the condition of displaced children after the Second World War, Brynner served as a special consultant to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 1959 and 1960, visiting camps in Europe and the Middle East. Out of that work came his book Bring Forth the Children, published in 1960 with his own photographs, which documented the lives of refugee children and argued for international attention to their plight ^[1].

Music remained a private constant. The Gypsy songs he had learned in the Paris clubs of the 1930s stayed in his repertoire, and in 1967 he recorded an album, The Gypsy and I, with his old friend Aliosha Dimitrievitch ^[3]. Friends described the guitar, not the throne of Siam, as his instrument of genuine self-expression.

Brynner married four times. His first wife was the American actress Virginia Gilmore, whom he married in 1944; their son, Yul Brynner Jr., known as Rock, was born in 1946 and later became a historian and the author of a candid biography of his father ^[4]. The marriage ended in 1960. That same year Brynner married Doris Kleiner, a Chilean model, on the set of The Magnificent Seven; their daughter Victoria was born in 1962 ^[2].

A third marriage, to the French socialite Jacqueline Thion de la Chaume in 1971, brought the adoption of two Vietnamese daughters, Mia and Melody. He also had a daughter, Lark, born in 1959 from a relationship outside marriage ^[4]. His final marriage, in 1983, was to Kathy Lee, a young dancer from the touring company of The King and I, who remained with him until his death.

He lived much of his adult life outside the United States, keeping homes in Switzerland and later at the Manoir de Criqueboeuf in Normandy, and he became a Swiss resident for tax purposes in the late 1950s ^[2]. He held United States citizenship from 1943, though he reportedly relinquished it in 1965 over tax complications tied to his residence abroad. To interviewers he remained a fabulist about himself, remarking that ordinary biographical truth was less interesting than invention, a stance his son documented with amusement and exasperation ^[4].

Film work thinned in the middle 1970s, and Brynner returned to the role that had made him. A revival of The King and I began touring the United States in 1977, reached Broadway that year, and continued in various forms, including a London run at the Palladium in 1979, almost without interruption into 1985 ^[6]. Audiences filled houses to see him even as critics noted that the show had become a vehicle for a single indestructible star. He performed through pain, wearing a back brace for the spinal trouble that dated to his circus fall.

In September 1983, while appearing in the tour, Brynner was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. He had been a heavy smoker since adolescence, by his own account starting at the age of twelve, although he had quit in 1971 ^[8]. Rather than withdraw, he continued the tour and the Broadway return engagement at the Broadway Theatre, giving his final performance as the King on June 30, 1985, days after receiving the special Tony Award ^[6].

Brynner died in New York City on October 10, 1985, at the age of 65, on the same day as the director and actor Orson Welles ^[8]. He was buried in France, in the grounds of the Saint-Michel-de-Bois-Aubry Orthodox monastery near Luze, a resting place in keeping with the Russian identity he had alternately hidden and embraced.

Months before his death, Brynner recorded an interview with Good Morning America in which he spoke directly about smoking and his cancer. After he died, the American Cancer Society used footage from that appearance in a public service announcement in which Brynner, addressing viewers he knew would see it posthumously, said simply that now that he was gone, he was telling them not to smoke. The advertisement became one of the most discussed anti-smoking messages ever broadcast in the United States ^[8].

His screen image proved durable. The robot gunslinger of Westworld echoed forward into later science fiction, and the HBO television series of the same name, launched in 2016, paid visual homage to his character ^[5]. The Magnificent Seven has been remade and endlessly imitated, and The King and I is revived regularly, with every actor who plays the King measured against the man who owned the role for 34 years. Brynner received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in his birthplace of Vladivostok a statue of him was unveiled in 2012 in front of the house where he was born ^[4].

For readers of any Yul Brynner biography, the striking thing is the distance between the invented selves and the verifiable life. He was a stateless child of the Russian Far East who became an emblem of American popular entertainment, a nightclub guitarist who won an Oscar, and a private man who spent his last strength on a public warning. The mixture of discipline, showmanship, and self-mythology has kept his name alive well beyond the era of his stardom ^[1].