In 1956, Brynner received the National Board of Review Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Rameses II in the Cecil B. DeMille epic The Ten Commandments and General Bounine in Anastasia.

[9][10][11][12] He was born at his parents' home, a four-storey house on 15 Aleutskaya Street, Vladivostok, into a wealthy Swiss Russian family of landowners and silver mining developers in Siberia and the Far East.

In October 1922, the Red Army occupied Vladivostok, and most of the Briner family's wealth was confiscated and nationalized at the end of the Russian Civil War.

The Briners were stripped of home ownership, but the family, including Yul's elder sister Vera, continued living in their house under a temporary status.

The actor's grandfather, Jules Briner (Бринер, Юлий Иванович), was a Swiss citizen who had moved to Vladivostok in the 1870s and established a successful import/export company.

Brynner's mother, Maria (Marousia) Dimitrievna (née Blagovidova, Мария Дмитриевна Благовидова[19]), hailed from the Russian intelligentsia and had studied to be an actress and singer.

Yul came into close contact with this culture in exile while working with his sister, singer Vera Brinner, and they were looking for a stage image.

Many years later, Katerina Kornakova would help Brynner with her letter of recommendation asking Michael Chekhov to employ him in his theatre company in the United States.

After leaving his children and his former wife in Vladivostok, Boris Briner lived briefly in Moscow with Katerina Ivanovna Kornakova, but eventually they moved to Harbin, Manchuria.

After initial success, he continued performing at various Parisian nightclubs, sometimes accompanying his sister, and playing and singing Russian and Roma songs.

Cocteau introduced Brynner to Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Josephine Baker, Jean Marais, and the bohemian milieu of Paris.

During their first lessons, Katerina Kornakova demonstrated and explained to Brynner the principles of Konstantin Stanislavsky's school of acting, and the innovative ideas of Michael Chekhov.

His father initially tried to prepare his son for a management position at their family business, but changed his mind after watching several acting lessons and witnessing Brynner's happiness.

Katerina Kornakova was impressed with Brynner's intellectual and physical abilities and recommended him to study acting with her former partner Michael Chekhov.

[citation needed] In 1941, Brynner made his stage debut in a Broadway production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night that premiered on December 2, 1941.

[29] The show closed, as did many other Broadway productions, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when America declared war on Japan and Nazi Germany.

Less so was The Buccaneer (1958), in which Brynner played Jean Lafitte; he co-starred with Heston, Inger Stevens, Claire Bloom and Charles Boyer in a historically accurate tale of the Battle of New Orleans.

[45] Although the public received him well in The Magnificent Seven (1960), a Western adaptation of Seven Samurai for The Mirisch Company, the picture proved a disappointment on its initial release in the U.S.

Less popular were Triple Cross (1966), a war movie with Christopher Plummer; The Double Man (1967), a spy thriller; The Long Duel (1967), an Imperial adventure tale opposite Trevor Howard; Villa Rides (1968), a Western; and The File of the Golden Goose (1969).

[49] Brynner went to Italy to make a Spaghetti Western, Adiós, Sabata (1970) and supported Kirk Douglas in The Light at the Edge of the World (1971).

[2] Brynner had a small role in Fuzz (1972)[2] then reprised his most famous part in the TV series Anna and the King (1972) which ran for 13 episodes.

After Night Flight from Moscow (1973) in Europe, Brynner created one of his iconic roles in the cult hit film Westworld (1973) as the 'Gunslinger', a killer robot.

Although Brynner had become a naturalized U.S. citizen, aged 22, in 1943, while living in New York as an actor and radio announcer,[6] he renounced his US citizenship at the U.S. Embassy in Bern, Switzerland, in June 1965 because he had lost his tax exemption as an American resident working abroad.

He and the national tour of the musical were forced to take a few months off while he underwent radiation therapy, which damaged his throat and made singing and speaking difficult.

Aware he was dying, Brynner gave an interview on Good Morning America discussing the dangers of smoking and expressing his desire to make an anti-smoking commercial.

[50] His third marriage broke up, reportedly owing to his 1980 announcement that he would continue in the role of the King for another long tour and Broadway run, as well as his affairs with female fans and his neglect of his wife and children.

[64] On April 4, 1983, aged 62, Brynner married his fourth and final wife, Kathy Lee (born 1957), a 26-year-old ballerina from Ipoh, Malaysia, whom he had met in a production of The King and I.

[68] Prior to his death, with the help of the American Cancer Society, Brynner created a public service announcement using a clip from the Good Morning America interview.

Created by local sculptor Alexei Bokiy, the monument was carved in granite monolith that was acquired in China and delivered to Vladivostok, Russia.

Vladivostok Mayor Igor Pushkariov, US Consul General Sylvia Curran, and Brynner's son, Rock, participated in the ceremony, along with hundreds of local residents.