He dressed only in black - and then, he once boasted, only in black by Balenciaga. Deborah Kerr, his costar from the movie version of "The King and I," believed his imperial manner was "really a sort of shyness." Maybe it was, but it was also in a time-honored tradition of good old-fashioned self-promotion. No two days are ever really alike if we are intensely aware and searching as we ought to be."Ī small, compact man, he even took on the stature of the King, nurturing an offstage image that was as exotic as it was forbidding. It applies to us as civilians and as artists. Asked once how he could do the same show night after night, he replied, "The only way it can be done is to start everything anew. The only way he was ever going to play Henry Higgins in "My Fair Lady," he joked, was with "an outer-Mongolian touring company." Right up until his death yesterday at 65, he remained loyal to the King, claiming that as he himself aged, he kept finding new aspects of the character to explore. If Brynner chaffed under the type-casting, he never admitted it publicly. But it galvanized "The King and I." Each time the unyielding monarch turned to Anna, the prim English tutor of his 82 children, swept her up in his arms and then waltzed her about the floor to the lilting strains of "Shall We Dance?," ripples of excitement invariably coursed through the theater. In other contexts, his arrogance could appear hokey. His elegantly bald head was his trademark, but his magnetism came from his burning eyes, the sharply arched eyebrows, the high cheekbones, the curiously pointed ears and an implicit sense of superiority that approached haughtiness, both onstage and off. His presence sliced through the atmosphere and demanded, rather like the King himself, undivided attention. Only once did The King fail him, and that was for a misguided 1972 TV series, "Anna and the King." If you wanted to see Brynner, you wanted to see him in the flesh. At the curtain call, the orchestra played Auld Lang Syne and the cheering audience wouldn't let him off the stage. For his final appearance in New York on June 30, tickets were priced at $75, which seemed a modest fee to behold what was by then a legendary performance. And run, it did.īrynner played the role 4,625 times - rarely to an empty seat. Thereafter, whenever, his star threatened to dim, he knew that all he had to do was kick off his shoes and don the loose-fitting royal pajamas that revealed a broad expanse of chest and the public would come running. In 1951, he leapt to fame as the autocratic ruler of 19th-century Siam in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "The King and I." He repeated his triumphant performance in the 1956 screen version. Although he appeared in more than 30 movies and at least five Broadway productions, as far as the public was concerned, Yul Brynner had only one role in him.
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