Yul Brynner

Born in Vladivostok, Russia, on July 11, 1920 (in some interviews he stated that he was born on other dates), Yuli Borisovich Bryner was the son of a mining engineer and a woman who had studied to be an actress, but did not practice. In later interviews, Brynner came to ensure that he was a descendant of Genghis Khan, although it must have been one of his frequent inventions. When he was very young, his father left the family to go with another woman, so he moved with his sister and his mother to China (other times the actor said that his mother had died in the Birth).

During his youth, he moved to France, where he worked as a trapeze artist and musician, among other occupations. He started out as an actor on the stage, after joining Michael Chekhov ‘s theater company , where he adopted the stage name “Youl Brynner”. Shortly after, he made his Broadway debut, to rave reviews.

He made his film debut as a secondary – already as Yul Brynner , without “o” – with the film noir Puerto de Nueva York , by Laslo Benedek, from 1949, about drug dealers from the docks. But the performer who was used to succeeding on stage goes completely unnoticed. something is wrong He comes to the conclusion that he just wasn’t completely photogenic, so he disinterested himself in movies for the next seven years. In addition to lavishing himself as a director of television series episodes, at that time he returned to the stage. He especially devastates as the lead in the Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers musical The King and I., which ran from 1951 to 1956. That year, he accepted an offer to star in the mythical film version, directed by Walter Lang , where he shared the screen with Deborah Kerr . Brynner does a great job as King Mongkut of Siam, who hires Anna Leonowens, a British governess, for his children.

This time, the film triumphs and Yul Brynner becomes a worldwide celebrity. What has changed since her debut? She immediately realizes that in order to give life to the monarch she had decided to shave her hair to zero, which avoided her receding hairline, which in her previous film made her hair look like a stain. ink. The occasion paints her bald, so the actor decides to continue shaving, and during the rest of his career he barely goes out with hair in the movies again. “Baldness is like a tailcoat: you have to know how to wear it,” said the actor.

For the film he won the Oscar for best actor (he is never nominated or given any major award again). At that time, Brynner gave various versions of his origins in the newspapers, for example that he came from a rich and ancestral Mongolian family, and that he had spent his childhood in a castle, among dozens of servants who awaited any order from him. His publicity agents advise him that after winning the Academy Award he should “moderate his fantasies a bit” and bring some order to his biography. But Yul refuses. “It would be torture. My death. Imagine: always being the same person! No, I want to change my background whenever I feel like it.”

In Cecil B. DeMille ‘s spectacular The Ten Commandments , Yul Brynner was Ramses, half-brother to Moses ( Charlton Heston ). He does some of his best work, as an arrogant, hate-filled prince. He also shines in Anastasia , by Anatole Litvak , as an exiled Russian general who thinks he recognizes the tsar’s daughter in the figure of a young woman ( Ingrid Bergman ) whom he meets by chance. It is followed by titles such as The Karamazov Brothers , Red Sunset and The Sound and the Fury . Possibly one of his best works is the one he played in the Stanley Donen comedy You will return to me , an orchestra director who, after committing a serious mistake, tries to get his wife back, and who, under his megalomaniac appearance, turns out to be a man with a good heart.

In 1959, he replaced the late Tyrone Power at the last minute as the lead in Solomon and the Queen of Sheba , which was being shot in the outskirts of Madrid. It is said that in the bar of a central hotel in the Spanish capital he was recognized by a young woman who asked him if he was Yul Brynner. He replied “No, I’m his double”, a formula that apparently he habitually used to get rid of fans who asked for his autographs.

That same year, he divorced Virginia Gilmore , a secondary actress in The Pride of the Yankees , with whom he had shared the hard years in which triumph resisted him and who was the mother of his son Yul, better known as ‘Rocky’ . He was together for seven years with the Chilean model Doris Kleiner, who gave birth to another daughter. He replaced the latter couple with Jacqueline de Croisset, with whom he adopted two Vietnamese girls. At the end of his life he still had a fourth wife, the young dancer Kathy Lee, who accompanied him until her death. He had been the father of one more girl, the result of an extramarital relationship with the young Frankie Tiden (among his many conquests, the actress Marlene Dietrich also stands out ).

In the 1960s, Yul Brynner shot titles such as Taras Bulba , Morituri , The Shadow of a Giant , The Battle of the Neretva River , Villa Cabalga and La Madre de Chaillot , but above all he triumphed with the western The Magnificent Seven , the American version of The Seven Samurai , where he played Chris Adams. Brynner was the only original cast to appear in the first sequel, The Return of the Magnificent Seven , and his character, Chris, was portrayed by George Kennedy in Clash of the Magnificent Seven and Lee Van Cleef ., en El desafío de los siete magníficos.

In the 70s, his star gradually declined, although he repeated as King Mongkut, in the television series Anna and the King , where this time he was accompanied by Samantha Eggar . In addition, he played titles such as Nobody’s Gold , The Serpent , New York, 2012 and especially the science fiction film Almas de Metal , directed by Michael Crichton , where he plays an android in a futuristic amusement park that causes chaos. when it starts to fail. His character has the appearance of a gunslinger, in clear homage to his work in The Magnificent Seven . He played it again in Future World, the sequel. After the 1976 thriller Con la rabía en los ojos , he retired from cinema (later he only served as a narrator in the short Lost to the Revolution , from 1980).

A versatile man, Yul Brynner took numerous photographs, especially during filming, and published an album where he sang gypsy songs. A chain smoker his entire life, he eventually contracted lung cancer. Shortly before his death, which occurred on October 10, 1985, he appeared on the American television program “Good Morning, America” ​​to warn of the risks of tobacco. An excerpt from the interview was used by the American Cancer Society for an advertisement with the slogan: “Now that I’m gone, I tell you: don’t smoke.” His mortal remains rest in the abbey of Saint-Michel-de-Bois-Aubry, in Luzé, next to Poitiers, in central France.