Hollywood Actors Archives

Yul Brynner

Yul Brynner obituary in “The Los Angeles Times”.

Yul Brynner can claim two iconic roles to his credit. He will forever be associated with the musical “The King and I” where he played King Mongkut of Siam. He first played the role on Broadway in the early 1950’s and won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the film in 1956. His other celluloid image is as Chris Larabee Adams in the hugely popular “The Magnificent Seven”. For trivia fans, can you name the other six actors who formed the magnificent seven without checking on the internet.

His obituary in “Los Angeles Times:

Yul Brynner, who with shaved head and regally haughty presence played and replayed the starring role in “The King and I” for more than 30 years, died early today in a New York Hospital. He was 65.

With him when he died at 1 a.m. at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center were his wife, Kathy Lee, and his four children, said Josh Ellis, the actor’s spokesman.

“He died of multiple complications that came as a result of what was originally cancer,” Ellis said. “He faced death with a dignity and strength that astounded his doctors. He fought like a lion.”

“He was a remarkable person,” Charlton Heston, who starred with Brynner in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 movie epic “The Ten Commandments,” told the Associated Press. “His work in ‘King and I’ was beyond compare. He was a very special talent. I’m very sorry to hear of his death.”

FOR THE RECORD – Yul Brynner: The obituary of actor Yul Brynner in the Oct. 10, 1985, Section A reported his birth date as July 11, 1917. According to public records, he was born July 11, 1920.

Though there were other Broadway and movie roles for Brynner, it is doubtful that any successful actor of his time had been so associated with a single character as was Brynner with the arrogant, bombastic King of Siam.

None of Brynner’s other parts were nearly as memorable as the king. If he became typecast, it was something Brynner didn’t seem to mind. For one thing, there were certain physical limitations that kept him from a wider variety of parts.

“I would have liked to play Henry Higgins (in ‘My Fair Lady’),” he told a Times interviewer a decade ago, “but I couldn’t because of my accent and looks. Unless I did it with an Outer Mongolian touring company.”

For another, the money from the play, the movie, and the seemingly countless touring companies of the play made him a millionaire.

Born Taidje Khan on July 11, 1917, on the island of Sakhalin off northern Japan, Brynner was the son of a Mongolian mining engineer and a Gypsy mother who died at his birth. His father was born in Switzerland and later secured Swiss citizenship and changed the family name to Brynner.

For the first eight years of his life, young Yul lived in China, and then was sent by his father to live with his maternal grandmother in Paris, but she died soon afterward. He attended a Paris school for a time, but dropped out at the age of 13 and joined a Gypsy troupe as a traveling minstrel.

He worked as an acrobat in a French circus for three years, performing on the high trapeze. But after a bad injury, Brynner turned from the circus to the stage.

It was acting that brought Brynner to America, touring in a struggling Shakespearean troupe on college campuses. He added English and some Russian (learned from other actors) to his collection of languages that included French, Japanese and Hungarian while playing small parts and driving the troupe’s bus–all for $25 a week.

In February, 1946, he made his debut on Broadway, playing an Oriental prince opposite Mary Martin in “Lute Song.” After 142 performances, Brynner took the show on tour.

But Brynner had doubts about his ultimate success as an actor. Years later, he remembered one night on stage–long before “The King and I”–when an outraged theatergoer hit him with a shoe. “And it was a perfectly serviceable shoe,” he said. “The man must have really hated me.”

Brynner returned to New York in 1948, putting aside his stage acting ambitions and settling comfortably into the role of actor, director and producer in the fledgling television industry, ultimately directing episodes of “Studio One,” one of the more successful live, anthology television shows of the 1950s.

But Brynner fell in love with the script of “The King and I” when Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein offered him the role. Hammerstein had seen Brynner in “Lute Song,” thought well of him and was influenced by Martin’s recommendation.

The musical story of the imperious Thai king and the proper British teacher, Anna Leonowens, who went to Siam in the 1860s to instruct the king’s huge flock of offspring and then had to acclimate herself to his court habits of polygamy and bowing at ground-level, had a rocky start when it opened out of town in New Haven, Conn., in February, 1951.

“It was a disaster,” Brynner said in 1981. “It was almost five hours long. There was nothing but conflict between Anna and the King. . . . Rogers and Hammerstein understood immediately that unless there was an underlying fascination (between the two characters), then there really couldn’t be a fascinating show.”

With the book cut and sweetened, as well as a couple of new songs added (“Shall We Dance” and “Getting to Know You”) the show, starring Gertrude Lawrence and Brynner, opened in New York at the St. James Theater on March 29, 1951. It was a first-night hit.

“Richard Rodgers told me, ‘You opened. You have a hit. Now freeze it,’ ” he said in late 1984, just before opening in yet another Broadway revival of the show.

The above “Los Angeles Times” obituary can also be accessed online here.

A website on Yul Brynner can be accessed here.

Simone Simon obituary in “The Guardian” in 2005.

Almost two decades before Brigitte Bardot, the epithet “sex kitten” could have been applied even more appropriately to Simone Simon, who has died aged 94.

Jean Renoir described the character Simon played in La Bête Humaine (1938) thus: “Severine is not a vamp. She’s a cat, a real cat, with a silky coat that begs to be caressed, a short little snout, a big, slightly beseeching mouth and eyes full of promises.” To add to the analogy, Simon is first seen in the film at a window, gently stroking a white kitten.

But her most famous role was in Cat People (1942) as Irene, a Serbian-born fashion artist living in New York, who is haunted by the fear that she is descended from a race of cat-women who turn into panthers when sexually aroused. “Kiss me or claw me!” read the ads.

Simone Simon, the daughter of a French engineer and an Italian mother, was born in Béthune and brought up in Marseilles. At 19, she went to Paris, where she worked briefly as a fashion designer, a model and cabaret singer, before making her screen debut as a singer in Le Chanteur Inconnu (1931). It was her fourth film, Lac Aux Dames (1934), directed by Marc Allégret, that made her a star. In the Colette screenplay, Simon is a mysterious child of nature called Puck, who entrances Jean-Pierre Aumont, the swimming instructor at a mountain lake resort.

It led to a contract with 20th Century Fox, who exploited her child-woman sensuality. In her Hollywood debut, Girls’ Dormitory (1936) she played a student at an Alpine finishing school who falls for Herbert Marshall, the headmaster, even though he is old enough to be her father. At the end of this Lolita-esque tale, Simon (actually 25) steps aside for an older woman.

In the redundant remake of the Janet Gaynor-Charles Farrell silent melodrama Seventh Heaven, Simon is a woman with a shady reputation, whom Parisian sewer-worker James Stewart has given shelter in his slum apartment. “Diane, don’t ever leave me, or like a candle, I’ll go out,” he says. This was followed by Love And Hisses (1937), in which she actually sang the Bell Song from Delibes’ Lakmé in what the New York Times described as “a thin, inexpressive little voice”. She then took the title role in a bit of fluff called Josette (1938), being fought over by Don Ameche and Robert Young.

No wonder she found herself in conflict with Fox, both over the material and her salary, and she arrived back in France on August 8 1938, 10 days before shooting began there on La Bête Humaine. For the role of Severine, who persuades her lover Lantier (Jean Gabin) to murder her husband, the producers originally suggested Gina Manès, then pushing 43, who had played various femme fatale roles. Renoir refused vehemently: “I claimed, and still claim, that vamps have to be played by women with innocent faces. Women with innocent faces are the most dangerous ones! Also, you don’t expect it, so there is an element of surprise! I insisted we use Simone Simon, which we did, and I don’t think we were sorry.” (Curiously, Manès was seriously injured by a tiger in a circus in 1942, when Simon was filming Cat People.)

Following the glowing reviews Simon received for her performance – a teasing mixture of innocence, perversity and sensuality – she asked for 800,000 francs on Renoir’s next film, La Règle Du Jeu, almost one third of the projected budget, much more than the producers were willing to pay. She was offered a better deal by RKO in Hollywood, returning to play, literally, a vixen from hell in the Faustian All That Money Can Buy (1942). Then came Cat People, in which she portrayed, with sensitivity and restraint, a tortured creature, as terrifying to herself as others.

Although RKO advertised The Curse Of The Cat People (1944) with the legend “The Beast Woman Haunts The Night Anew!”, it was not strictly speaking a horror film. In it, Simon again played Irene, now seemingly back from the dead to become an adviser and friend to the lonely six-year-old daughter of her ex-husband. Only seen by the little girl, she drifts through the film in an ethereal manner.

Simon’s last American film was Mademoiselle Fifi (1944), a hymn to French resistance, though set during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Based on Maupassant’s Boule De Suif, the title role was in fact, the nickname given to a sadistic Prussian officer occupying a small French village, and Simon is the laundress with whom he meets retribution.

The war over, Simon returned to Europe, playing a mercenary showgirl in the British-made Temptation Harbour (1947), and the chambermaid in Max Ophuls’ La Ronde (1950), who, after being seduced by a soldier, seduces a student.

Jacqueline Audrey’s Olivia (1951) was full of hothouse emotions and lesbian undertones with Simon and Edwige Feuillère as sisters who run a girls’ boarding school, dividing the establishment into two factions.

For Ophuls again, she appeared in another Maupassant tale, Le Plaisir (1952), as the model and mistress of an artist whom she forces to marry her out of sympathy when she cripples herself attempting suicide. Simon retired after The Extra Day (1956), a British picture in which she played a French film star.

A few years ago, during the making of the Omnibus TV documentary on Jean Renoir, Simone Simon was asked for an interview. She refused, saying that she did not want to appear on camera as she was “a very old woman”. Perhaps it was a wise decision, as she has left us with a vision of a lovely, young woman.

· Simone Simon, actor, born April 23 1910; died February 22 2005.

Her Guardian obituary can also be accessed on line here.

Collection of Classic Hollywood Actors

Yul Brynner

Yul Brynner obituary in “The Los Angeles Times”.

Simone Simon

Simone Simon obituary in “The Guardian” in 2005.

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