THE STORY BEHIND...

From choppers to carpets, his demands were notorious. Did playing a king go to his head, asks Martin Chilton

audiences, telling him one night: “They were s---. I would not bow. I gave them my ass.” When he reprised the role of Mongkut in the 1980s, he told “some giggly ladies” in the audience to “shut up”. “The theatre is my palace and I can tell them what to do,” he said. Despite his temper, he was adamant that he had no need for psychotherapy. “The day anyone stretches me out on a couch, I’ll be either drunk or dead,” he said.

According to Brynner’s agent, Robbie Lantz, his contract demands were astonishing. He would specify the colour of the carpet in his trailer, along with the brand of tissues and bottled water. In hotels, his “imperial conditions” included touch-tone telephones with 13ft cords, blackout curtains, brown eggs only for breakfast and absurdly expensive bottles of wine. By 1965, when he played Captain Mueller in Morituri – alongside

Marlon Brando as Robert Crain – Brynner was powerful enough to stipulate that a landing pad be built on the ship so that a private helicopter could take him ashore after each day’s shoot.

Despite earning what Lantz called “astronomical” fees,

Brynner was tight-fisted. George Jacobs, who was part of Frank Sinatra’s staff, wrote: “Yul Brynner was hanging around, sponging off Frank for food, drink and girls… we called him Uncle Scrooge, the king of the tightwads.”

In 1971, Brynner married for the third time, to Jacqueline Thion de la Chaume, French Vogue’s fashion editor. She and Brynner adopted two Vietnamese children, Mia and Melody, and bought the 16th-century, 50-acre Manoir de Criqueboeuf in Normandy, where

‘I am going to show the world,’ he said to Ingrid Bergman, ‘what a big horse you are’

Brynner kept a rookery of penguins.

Around that time, he was sent the script for Westworld, a sciencefiction thriller by Michael

Crichton. Brynner was an avid reader. He had studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and in Chicago he attended ethics classes run by Paul Arthur Schilpp, founder of the Library of Living Philosophers. Schilpp described Brynner as “one of the most brilliant minds I ever encountered”. Brynner admired the way Westworld explored the theme of human “infantilism in the face of new technology”. Crichton thought the actor was perfect for the part of the cyborg gunslinger. “If anyone really built a place like Westworld, they probably would make the gunfighter robot in the image of Yul Brynner,” he said.

Brynner took the role seriously, even wearing silver-metallic contact lenses for a steely, robotlike stare. Richard Benjamin, who played the man Brynner’s malfunctioning robot tries to kill in the futuristic amusement park, said Brynner “taught me how to fire a gun in a movie and not blink”. “He said, ‘You look at the biggest Western stars, and I’ll show you that they blink when the gun goes off.’ He was a pretty amazing, larger-than-life person.”

Westworld was Brynner’s last great movie role. He reprised Mongkut in endless reruns of The King and I, before dying of throat cancer, aged 65, in 1985. In typical Brynner fashion, he left conflicting demands for his epitaph, including “I have arrived” and “Here lies a man who adored children of all varieties”. But the only words on his headstone, in a churchyard in the Loire, are his name and dates. It was one contract demand he wasn’t around to enforce.