“It was a disaster,” Brynner said in 1981. 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. Hammerstein had seen Brynner in “Lute Song,” thought well of him and was influenced by Martin’s recommendation. “The man must have really hated me.”īrynner 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.īut Brynner fell in love with the script of “The King and I” when Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein offered him the role. “And it was a perfectly serviceable shoe,” he said. Years later, he remembered one night on stage-long before “The King and I”-when an outraged theatergoer hit him with a shoe. 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.īut Brynner had doubts about his ultimate success as an actor. 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. It was acting that brought Brynner to America, touring in a struggling Shakespearean troupe on college campuses. But after a bad injury, Brynner turned from the circus to the stage. He worked as an acrobat in a French circus for three years, performing on the high trapeze. 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. 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.
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