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Yul Brynner

Yul Brynner (Youl Bryner) (1915-1985), b. Sakhalin, Russia The only bald, ex-trapeze artist, philosophy graduate of the Sorbonns to star in films, Yul Brynner had so much originality, so little interest. The son of Swiss and Mongolian parents, Brynner always carried himself with an air of enjoyable implausibility. But all too often the film world accepted him as a true exotic rather than an amused sham. Briefly, in Once More With Feeling (59, Stanley Donen), he was permitted to make fun of his own mysterious glamour; and in Le Testament d’Orph^e (60, Jean Cocteau) he had a moment of studied inscrutability. But set down in any of the naturalistic environs of American genres he looked like a man from nowhere, relying on the dubious notion that bald men appeal to women. The record of his career suggests that the novelty soon wore off, but that baldness was an extreme gesture that could not be abandoned, Imagine the humiliation of a Brynner in hair; picture the ordeal of forever shaving his head for increasingly mediocre films. He went to America in 1941 and entered the theatre. It was the part of the king in The King and I that brought him fame and, incredibly, the Oscar for best actor in the film made of it in 1956, directed by Walter Lang. That was his second film. In 1949 he had appeared in fort of New Yorfc (Laslo Benedek), amid a career in TV as performer and producer. His King of Siam was an inconsequential performance, full of brooding stares that already suggested a sense of the ridiculous. But domed sex was not to be denied, and for a few years Brynner tried to live up to a public relations picture of domineering, sensual cruelty: as Pharaoh in The Ten Commandments (56, Cecil B. De Mille); Anastasia (56, Auatole Litvak); helplessly trying to be passionate as Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov (57, Richard Brooks); The journey (58, Litvak); escaping into hair as Jason in The Sound and the Fury (59, Martin Ritt) and in The Buccaneer (58, Anthony Quinn); stepping into Tyrone Power’s sandals and armor for Solomon and Sheba (59, King Vidor); and then playing the lead in The Magnificent Seven (60, John Sturges). That film was a great success, but it was the beginning of Brynner’s decline into European-based thrillers and Spanish Westerns, with the occasional return to an Oriental period piece: Taras Bulba (62, J. Lee Thompson);