Yul Brynner was born Yuliy Borisovich Briner on July 11, 1920. in Vladivostok, Russia. He had Swiss-German, Russian and Buryat ancestry, and was born at home in a four-story residence at 15 Aleutskaya Street, Vladivostok. While Brynner was still young, his father left the family, and they moved to China before settling in France. There, a teenaged Brynner became a nightclub balladeer and then a trapeze artist.
In the early 1940s Brynner settled in the United States, where he soon drifted into acting. He made a successful Broadway stage debut in 1941, appearing in William Shakespeare’s TWELFTH NIGHT. He acted in several other stage productions, including a lead role in LUTE SONG (1946), and from 1949 to 1953 he occasionally worked as a television director.
Brynner’s breakthrough came when he was offered the role of the arrogant king of Siam in the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musical THE KING AND I, for which he won immediate acclaim and a Tony Award in 1952. He became known for his resonant voice and irresistible charisma. From 1951 to 1954 Brynner gave 1,246 performances on Broadway as King Mongkut and then starred in the 1956 screen version, winning an Academy Award for Best Actor. He went on to give a total of 4,625 performances of the part, taking his last curtain call as the Siamese king in 1985, the year he died.
Brynner also had starring roles in other major films. He played Rameses, king of Egypt, in Cecil B. DeMille’s THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956). In the same year he starred opposite Ingrid Bergman in ANASTASIA, playing a Russian refugee making a roguish living in Paris. Taking the part of Solomon, Brynner starred in another Old Testament epic, SOLOMON AND SHEBA, playing alongside Gina Lollabrigida and George Sanders. Other roles were those of Dmitri in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV (1958) and the lead gunslinger in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) a western based, surprisingly enough, on Akira Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI (1954). His most memorable later performance was as a robot gunman in the sci-fi thriller WESTWORLD (1973).
In addition to his acting career, Brynner was a noted photographer, and he wrote BRING FORTH THE CHILDREN: A JOURNEY TO THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLE OF EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST (1960), which included some of his pictures. He was fluent in a number of languages and was a skilled guitar player.
Selected Filmography:
— WESTWORLD, 1973
— TARAS BULBA, 1962
— THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, 1960
— SOLOMON AND SHEBA, 1959
— THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, 1958
— ANASTASIA, 1956
— THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, 1956
— THE KING AND I, 1956