Yul Brynner ✝

Brynner was best known for his portrayal of King Mongkut of Siam in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I, for which he won two Tony Awards and an Academy Award for the film version. He played the role 4,625 times on stage. He also starred as Ramesses II in the Cecil B. DeMille epic The Ten Commandments (1956), and played General Bounine in the film Anastasia (also 1956), the gunman Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven (1960) and its first sequel Return of the Seven, and the android "The Gunslinger" in Westworld (1973) and its sequel Futureworld (1976).\n', ' Brynner was known for his shaved head, which he maintained as a personal trademark long after adopting it in 1951 for his role in The King and I. Earlier, he was a model and television director, and later a photographer and the author of two books.\n', ' Yul Brynner was born Yuliy Borisovich Briner on July 11, 1920 in Vladivostok, Far Eastern Republic (present-day Primorsky Krai, Russia). He enjoyed telling tall tales and exaggerating his background and early life for the press, claiming that he was born "Taidje Khan" of part-Mongol parentage, on the Russian island of Sakhalin. In reality of Swiss-German, Russian, and partial Buryat ancestry, he was born at home in a four-story residence at 15 Aleutskaya Street, Vladivostok. He had an elder sister, Vera. He occasionally referred to himself as Julius Briner, Jules Bryner or Youl Bryner. The 1989 biography by his son, Rock Brynner, clarified some of these issues.\n', '