FAMOUS FACES IN GLASGOW! YOU’LL KNOW YUL ... STAR IS A HIT IN THE CITY
Stage and screen icon charms Scottish press
IT is March, 1959, and few people passing through the Central Hotel in Glasgow could have failed to recognise the star meeting journalists in the lobby.
The Evening Times ran with a picture of one delighted fan, and the caption: “You’ll recognise Yul – even with his hat on…”
Yul Brynner, star of stage and screen, was in town to attend the Scottish premiere of The Journey, about the Hungarian Revolution. It was at the Regal on Sauchiehall Street, and Brynner was making a personal appearance, prompting a frenzy of attention from his Glaswegian fans.
The film co- starred his close friend, Glasgow acting legend
Deborah Kerr ( with whom, of course, he had appeared a few years earlier, in The King And I) and Jason Robards.
Ahead of him lay such films as The Magnificent Seven and, much later, Westworld.
Inside our newspaper, writer Meg Munro got the chance to meet him at the press reception, describing him as a “real charmer”.
“He strolled into a reception at the Central Hotel… shook hands individually with upwards of 100 members of the Scottish press and then sat down quietly in an armchair,” she wrote.
“He is the most composed man in the world.”
For his visit to Scotland, Brynner wore a grey Glenurquhart checked suit, a blue- grey shirt and black tie.
“He has dark, dark, brown eyes and he’s a smasher when he smiles,” cooed Meg, who spends a great deal of the ensuing paragraphs lamenting about the actor’s lack of hair.
Bryner’s famous shaved head, or as our sister newspaper The Herald put it, his “shiny, bumpy, dolichocephalic” skull seemed to captivate the press, almost as much as the star’s conversations about everything from the movie he was here to promote, to his stamp collecting hobby.
“It’s a hobby you start quite innocently, and then you find you’re stuck with it,” he said.
The Herald’s journalists also impressed.
“He is patient with photographers; he has brown eyes; he is of medium build and is a strong handshake,” they pointed out.
“He also speaks Russian, which he learned from an actor with whom he once played in Paris.”
Brynner smoked French cigarettes and told the assembled were journalists about his origins – he was born on an island off the coast of Japan and spent his boyhood in Paris – and joked that he drank water “during daylight hours and switched to Scotch after dark”.
He heaped praise on Kerr – “one of the most brilliant women of the stage and screen” – and said the most important job of all in a film studio was that of the director. “He is the real storyteller, the actors are only his mouthpiece,” he said.
Meg Munro summed him up. “He speaks easily and his voice, like his face, is lively and expressive. And top marks to him – he acts normally, doesn’t think of himself as a ‘ film star’ but as a man doing a job of work he enjoys.”
Brynner died in aged 65.
October 1985,
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