Yul Brynner - Early Life

Early Life

Yul Brynner was born Yuliy Borisovich Bryner in 1920. He exaggerated his background and early life for the press, claiming that he was born Taidje Khan of part-Mongol parentage, on the Russian island of Sakhalin. In reality, he was born at home in a four-storey residence at 15 Aleutskaya Street, Vladivostok, in the Far Eastern Republic (present-day Primorsky Krai, Russia). He also occasionally referred to himself as Julius Briner, Jules Bryner, or Youl Bryner. A biography written by his son, Rock Brynner, in 1989 clarified these issues.

His father, Boris Yuliyevich Bryner, was a mining engineer whose father, Jules Bryner, was Swiss, and whose mother, Natalya Iosifovna Kurkutova, was a native of Irkutsk and was partly of Buryat ancestry. His mother, Marousia Dimitrievna (née Blagovidova), came from the intelligentsia and studied to be an actress and singer; she was the granddaughter of a doctor who had converted from Judaism to the Russian Orthodox Church.

He also had a strong personal connection to the Romani people, thanks to his close association with the Dmitrievitch family, with whom he performed in Paris night clubs in the 1930s. In 1977, he was named Honorary President of the International Romani Union, an office that he kept until his death. After Boris Bryner abandoned his family, his mother took Yul and his sister, Vera Bryner, to Harbin, Manchuria (present day China), where they attended a school run by the YMCA. In 1934 she took them to Paris. By 1940, Brynner had returned to China and he emigrated from Dairen aboard the S.S. President Cleveland, arriving in the U.S. October 25, 1940. During World War II, Brynner worked as a French-speaking radio announcer and commentator for the U.S. Office of War Information, broadcasting propaganda to occupied France.