Probably no other actor was more identified with a single role than Yul Brynner in his bravura turn as the Siamese monarch Mongkut in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I. Brynner originated the role on Broadway in 1951 with Gertrude Lawrence as the English heroine "Mrs. Anna" Leonowens, winning a Tony award for his performance. He then won an Oscar® for the 1956 film version in which he played opposite Deborah Kerr. Brynner also played Mongkut in a short-lived TV series, Anna and the King, on CBS in 1972. After appearing in several revivals of the musical, he racked up a grand total of 4,525 onstage performances as the king.

Despite the overriding image of Brynner as the arrogant yet endearing king, he played a variety of leading roles in some three dozen other movies. Among his other most memorable characters were Pharaoh Rameses II, the formidable antagonist of Charlton Heston's Moses, in The Ten Commandments (1956); Bounine, the opportunistic Russian general who serves as Ingrid Bergman's coach in Anastasia (1956); Dmitri, the eldest brother in The Brothers Karamazov (1958); Solomon in Solomon and Sheba (1959), opposite Gina Lollobrigida; Chris Larabee Adams, the cool-headed leader of the gang of gunfighters in The Magnificent Seven (1960); and the murderous "Gunslinger" in Westworld (1973) and its sequel, Futureworld (1976).

Brynner so enjoyed spinning tall tales about his past and ethnic background that his history remained clouded for many years. It was only a biography by his son Rock, Yul: The Man Who Would Be King (1989), that set the record straight: Yul Brynner was born Yuli Borisovich Bryner in Vladivostok in 1920, the son of a Swiss-Russian engineer and his wife, the daughter of a Russian doctor.

When Yuli's father abandoned the family, his mother took him and his sister Vera to live in Harbin, Manchuria, then to Paris. Brynner, whose education was sketchy, became a musician and played guitar in Parisian nightclubs. After a stint as a trapeze artist and an apprentice at the Theatre des Mathurins, he came to the U.S. in 1941 to study with acting coach Michael Chekhov.

Brynner made his Broadway debut in Lute Song in 1946, starring Mary Martin. After some work in television he made his movie debut in Port of New York (1949), playing a debonair gang leader. It was the only film in which he would appear with a full head of his own hair.

Brynner shaved his head for the original Broadway production of The King and I at the suggestion of costume designer Irene Sharaff, whose research had shown that the real king of Siam had lived in a Buddhist monastery, where his head was shaved. Brynner took her suggestion -- reluctantly at first, but then he grew to prefer the shaved look. He would keep the bald pate (occasionally topped by wigs) as his signature look for the rest of his career. And due to the original confusion about his background, he was able to continue his pattern of playing a variety of nationalities.

In the colorfully produced Kings of the Sun (1963) Brynner plays a Native American chief who competes with a young Mayan king (George Chakiris) for the hand of a Mayan princess (Shirley Anne Field). In Flight from Ashiya (1964) he is a half-Japanese, half-Polish American sergeant who's part of a rescue mission from the Ashiya Air Force Rescue station in Japan. In Triple Cross (1966), an espionage tale set during WWII, Brynner plays an anti-Nazi German officer. In another spy thriller, The Double Man (1967), Brynner has a dual role as a ruthless American CIA agent investigating the death of his son, and the "double" who impersonates him in a sinister plot hatched by Soviet agents.

Brynner, who died in 1985, was married four times. He was an accomplished photographer who often took shots on the sets of his films. Reportedly, one of his biggest career disappointments was losing the title role in Spartacus (1960) to Kirk Douglas.

by Roger Fristoe