Yul Brynner’s Daughter Finally Confirms What We All Suspected

Long before he became one of Hollywood’s most instantly recognizable faces, Yul Brynner was a boy without a country, without a father, and without any guarantee of a future.

He was born on July 11, 1920, in Vladivostok, a rugged port city on Russia’s Pacific coast — a birth date and birthplace he would spend much of his adult life denying, reinventing, or obscuring entirely.

His father, Boris, a mining engineer, abandoned the family while Yul was still a child, leaving a wound that his daughter Victoria later confirmed shaped nearly everything about him — his guardedness, his need for control, his relentless self-mythologizing.

His mother, Marusia, of Swiss-German descent, raised him largely alone, eventually moving the family first to Beijing and then to Paris in search of stability neither city fully provided.

From his father’s side, Brynner carried Mongolian and Buryat heritage, a blend of cultures that gave him the striking, unplaceable look audiences would later find unforgettable.

Paris offered no easy escape from hardship. By sixteen, Brynner had left school entirely, working first as a guitarist in a traveling Romani music troupe before joining the Cirque d’Hiver as an acrobat and trapeze artiSt. That chapter ended violently in 1937, when a fall from the parallel bars left him with 49 fractures and ended his circus career overnight.

Unable to return to performing physically, he drifted toward theater — and found, almost by accident, the thing he’d actually been built for.

In 1941, at just 21, Brynner left France for New York with barely any money and no real connections.

He drove for an actors’ company, announced French-language radio broadcasts for the U.S. Office of War Information, and slowly worked his way into small Broadway roles.

Nothing about those years suggested stardom was coming. Then, in 1951, everything changed. Cast as King Mongkut in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I, Brynner was initially meant to play second fiddle to star Gertrude Lawrence.

Early audiences weren’t immediately won over — one frustrated theatergoer famously threw a shoe at him, a story he later told with pride.

But one decision changed the trajectory of his entire career: rather than wear a wig, Brynner shaved his head to match the real King Mongkut’s appearance.

He kept it that way for the rest of his life. When Lawrence died suddenly in 1952, Brynner inherited the production entirely, and by 1956 his film performance had earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor.

He would go on to play the role more than 4,000 times. Off stage, Brynner’s life was far messier than his commanding public image suggested.

He married actress Virginia Gilmore in 1944, and the union projected a picture of stability that served his rising career.

But privately, Brynner maintained relationships with men — most notably actor Hurd Hatfield, star of The Picture of Dorian Gray — connections he never publicly acknowledged in an era when doing so could have ended his career.

He posed nude for photographer George Platt Lynes and was rumored to be linked romantically to French artist Jean Cocteau.

Publicly, the press cast him as a ladies’ man, and rumored affairs with Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, and Joan Crawford only reinforced that image.

His temper and ego were just as legendary as his talent. Filming Anastasia in 1956, Brynner clashed with Ingrid Bergman, who was taller than him, reportedly telling her he wouldn’t hide it with camera tricks and would instead show the world what “a big horse” she was.

On the set of The Magnificent Seven in 1960, his rivalry with a then-rising Steve McQueen became the stuff of Hollywood legend — Brynner standing on mounds of dirt to appear taller, McQueen kicking them away when he wasn’t looking, and Brynner reportedly hiring someone to count how many times McQueen touched his hat during their shared scenes to gauge whether he was being upstaged.

McQueen later admitted flatly that the two simply never got along. Brynner’s contracts became famous in their own right for their extravagant, oddly specific demands — down to trailer carpet color, bottled water brands, and a private helicopter pad on at least one production.

Within Frank Sinatra’s circle, he reportedly earned the nickname “Uncle Scrooge” for his stinginess despite enormous wealth.

Underneath the bravado, though, was a habit that would eventually catch up with him. Brynner started smoking at age twelve and by adulthood was consuming up to five packs a day.

In 1983, he was diagnosed with lung cancer — the same year he married his fourth wife, ballerina Kathy Lee, nearly three decades his junior.

Facing his mortality, Brynner turned to Buddhism and continued performing in The King and I even as his illness progressed.

Before his death, he recorded an anti-smoking public service announcement, released posthumously, urging viewers never to pick up a cigarette.

He died in New York on October 10, 1985, at age 65. It was his daughter Victoria, born in 1962 to Brynner’s second wife, Chilean model Doris Kleiner, who eventually gave the world a clearer, more honest portrait of her father.

Victoria — whose godmother was family friend Audrey Hepburn — confirmed what many had long suspected: Brynner had spent decades lying about his own birth year, often claiming to have been born in 1915 or earlier to seem more worldly.

She confirmed the real bitterness he carried toward his absent father, and acknowledged his habit of inventing stories about his past, including a completely fabricated claim that he’d fought in the Spanish Civil War.

To Brynner, these weren’t quite lies — they were performance, an extension of the mysterious, commanding figure he’d built himself into being.

Victoria’s account didn’t diminish her father so much as complete him: brilliant and magnetic, but also guarded, wounded, and endlessly self-inventing.

The king, it turns out, was never only acting on stage.