Yul Brynner — actor with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born Yuliy Borisovich Briner on 11 July 1920, at home in a four-storey house at 15 Aleutskaya Street in Vladivostok, then the capital of the short-lived Far Eastern Republic. For most of his life he declined to say so. He told the press at various times that he was Taidje Khan, born on Sakhalin to a Mongol father and a Roma mother, and gave birth years ranging across most of a decade. The record was set straight only in 1989, four years after his death, in a biography by his son Rock Brynner.
The truth was no less unusual. His grandfather Jules Briner was a Swiss who had run away from home at sixteen, worked in Yokohama, and settled in Vladivostok in the 1870s, where he took Russian citizenship and built a substantial import-export and shipping business in the Russian Far East. The house on Aleutskaya was his. Jules married Natalya Iosifovna Kurkutova, from Irkutsk and partly of Buryat Mongol descent - so the Mongol ancestry Brynner exaggerated was real, just not in the way he told it.
His father, Boris Briner, was a mining engineer and inventor who had graduated from the Mining Institute in Saint Petersburg in 1910 and ran the family firm. His mother, Marousia Blagovidova, came from the intelligentsia and had trained as an actress and singer. His elder sister Vera became a soprano and sang with the New York City Opera.
Boris left the family in the 1920s. Marousia took the children first to Harbin in Manchuria, which held one of the largest Russian communities outside Russia, and then to Paris. There the boy left school, played guitar in nightclubs alongside Russian Roma musicians, worked as a trapeze artist with the Cirque d'Hiver until an injury ended it, and apprenticed at the Theatre des Mathurins.
He reached the United States around 1940 and studied with Michael Chekhov - nephew of the playwright, and himself an emigre - touring with Chekhov's company. He made his Broadway debut in 1941 in Twelfth Night, billed as Youl Bryner.
In 1951 he took the part of King Mongkut in The King and I. He played it 4,625 times on stage across three decades, won two Tony Awards for it and an Academy Award for the 1956 film, and kept the shaved head afterwards as a permanent trademark. He also appeared in The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven and Westworld, and worked as a photographer and author.
He held Soviet citizenship until 1943, American until 1965, and Swiss thereafter - three passports for a man born in a republic that no longer exists. He died in New York in October 1985 and is buried at a monastery in the Loire. A statue of him stands outside the family house in Vladivostok, and his son returns there for the city's film festival.
"Vladivostok to Harbin to Paris to New York; Soviet, then US, then Swiss citizenship"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Vladivostok
He invented several versions of his own origins for the press, including a Mongol father and birth on Sakhalin. His son Rock Brynner documented the real family history in 1989 and again in 2006. The Briner house at 15 Aleutskaya Street in Vladivostok still stands.
Born Yuliy Borisovich Briner in Vladivostok. His grandfather Jules Briner was a Swiss who settled there in the 1870s, took Russian citizenship and built a shipping and trading business in the Russian Far East; his grandmother Natalya Kurkutova was from Irkutsk and partly of Buryat Mongol descent. His father Boris was a mining engineer trained at the Saint Petersburg Mining Institute.
.svg?width=900)
Vladivostok. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
""I was born everywhere.""