The ‘King’ of Siam dies after long battle

Press, 11 October 1985, Page 6

The ‘King’ of Siam dies after long battle

NZPA-AP New York

Yul Brynner — who made a career playing the bald, autocratic monarch of Siam in “The King and I” — died yesterday. He was 65. His career as the King included a record 4625 performances on stage.

With him when he died at the New York Hospital-Cor-nell Medical Centre were his wife, Kathy Lee, and his four children

He died of multiple complications that came as a result of what was originally cancer, said Josh Ellis, a spokesman for Brynner. “He faced death with a dignity and strength that astounded his doctors. He fought like a lion,” he said. Although he made more than 36 movies, including such successful films as “The Ten Commandments,”

“The Magnificent Seven,” and “Anastasia,” Brynner was best known for his stage and screen portrayals of the splendiferous sovereign of Siam in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical classic. The role earned him a Tony award in 1952 and an Oscar in 1957, and a special Tony in June this year when he was nearing the end of his last long national tour in the show.

He played his final performance as the King on June 29 at the Broadway Theatre.

That last tour was interrupted in September, 1983, when Brynner, who at one time smoked five packets of cigarettes a day, needed treatment for lung cancer.

He received radiation therapy at the nuclear medicine department at

Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre, in Los Angeles. “I think that the discipline I acquired through 53 years of working in show business has helped me enormously with my own physical problems — whether it was a crash in the circus when I was 17 or the serious illness which I had more recently,” Brynner said in an interview in December. “You have to make a choice — being sick in bed, and that’s a fearsome kind of thing — or playing in a theatre to standing ovations every night. “The choice is obvious. I simply go on playing.” Brynner was born Taidje Khan on July 11, 1920, on Sakhalin Island, north of Japan. His office gives the 1920 date, although current bio-

graphy lists the year as 1917 and “Who’s Who in the Theatre” as 1915.

His background was as exotic as his looks. His father was a Mongolian mining engineer who was born in Switzerland and who later changed the family name to Brynner. His mother was a gipsy, who died at his birth.

Brynner’s early childhood was spent in Peking but he went to Paris to live with his grandmother and to study. In Europe, Brynner left school and joined a group of gipsies who performed in nightclubs ana circuses. He later worked as an acrobat until a bad fall at the age of 17 forced him to give up the trapeze. Brynner studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and

acting with the Russian director, Michael Chekhov.

He ended up in the United States in 1941 with Chekhov’s acting troupe and found work at the voice of America as a French-lan-guage announcer. He made his Broadway debut in 1946 as an oriental prince in the musical, “Lute Song.” His co-star was Mary Martin and it was she who told Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein four years later that Brynner was the only man who could play the monarch in “The King and I.” At the time, Brynner had found work as a director at the C.B.S. television network, supervising such early television shows as “Danger” and “Studio On?.” The musical, set in the 1860 s, concerns an English

governess, Anna Leonowens, played originally on stage by Gertrude Lawrence, who journeys to Siam to tutor the country’s Crown Prince and ends up educating his father as well.

*1 absolutely fell in love with the King,” Brynner said, recalling the first time he read the script

“He was irresistible. Here was an exceptional character, a very selfless man. All he wanted was really to better the conditions of life in his kingdom. “He brought the teacher there for that purpose. He wanted to be up-to-date.

“The themes of the play are still valid today,” Brynner said. “In the ’sos, human rights and women’s lib were pretty much intellectual exercises. That’s why the play

is not at all old-fashioned. “Conflicts between East and West, men and women, the generation gap, all of these things are in the play.”

The musical opened on Broadway, America’s theatre row, on March 29, 1951, and became one of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s biggest hits.

Miss Lawrence died during the Broadway run, but Brynner continued in the role until the show finally closed on March 20, 1954, after a 1246-performance run.

Brynner starred with Deborah Kerr in the movie version of the film, released in 1956.

Brynner played the King again in a 1977 revival with Constance Towers as Anna and again at the London

Palladium in June, 1979, for more than a year. His last national tour in “The King and I” began in. February, 1981. He shaved his head for, the role in 1951 and made the shaved scalp a trademark Brynner was married four times. His first wife was an actress, Virginia Gilmore. They had one son, Rock. Brynner then married Doris Kleiner, in 1946, and they had one child, Victoria. His third wife was Jacqueline Thion de la Chaume. They were married in 1971 and adopted two Vietnamese orphans, Mia and Melody. In 1983, he married Ms Lee, who played the lead royal dancer in Brynner’s final tour of “The King and I.”