Chapter 1 - A fantastic figure

Summary

‘For the first time, here is an actor with a personality as big as the vast CinemaScope screen,’ enthused the British fan magazine, Picturegoer, in September 1956, predicting that Yul Brynner would become the biggest name in Hollywood as ‘the animal magnetism of the man is something that must be experienced to be believed.’ This was the year that catapulted Brynner to international film stardom through his roles as ‘the King of Siam’ in the Hollywood rendition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I (Walter Lang, 1956); as Pharaoh Rameses II in the popular Biblical epic, The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956); and as a former Russian white general in Anastasia against Ingrid Bergman (Anatole Litvak, 1956): all three films were released within a period of six months. Although he had become a major Broadway star with the runaway success of The King and I in 1951, Brynner now seemed to be virtually everywhere, starring in eleven films and doing a cameo in a twelfth by 1960.

His was a novel film star aesthetic, one expansively and opaquely exotic, in-your-face masculine, and intense in its physical presence. ‘There are things about Yul Brynner which reach out and grab you,’ Saturday Evening Post reported in 1958: ‘First, there are his eyes – burning, hypnotic, ripe-olive brown. Then there's his head, which is (and this will come as a surprise to nobody) shaved as clean as a seven-and-a-half-pound egg.’ The mesmerized writer was not alone in his ruminations. Musing over the actor's ‘flattish nose,’ ‘flaring nostrils,’ and ‘fawnlike ears,’ Collier's concluded that his ‘totally hairless skull plus the electricity he discharges with his slightest movement give Brynner the effect of a young Tartar colonel in one of Genghis Khan's crack cavalry regiments.’

A head initially shaved for the Broadway premiere of The King and I was Yul Brynner's most striking singular physical feature that set him apart from his contemporaries and rendered him instantaneously recognisable. Yet his presence was identified as striking also more broadly: ‘Beneath that fabulous dome, fierce eyes smolder above Asian cheek-bones and brazenly flared nostrils,’ wrote the scandal tabloid, Hush-Hush.