Russian actor Yul Brynner was BOTD in 1920. Born in Vladivosok in the Far Eastern Republic of Soviet Russia, his father left the family home when he was a child, and he emigrated with his mother to China before settling in Paris. As a teenager, he became a nightclub balladeer and a trapeze artist. After sustaining a back injury while performing, he developed an opium dependency. While buying opium, he met fellow addict Jean Cocteau, who introduced him to an artistic milieu including Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Josephine Baker and Jean Marais. A full-blown addict by 17, his family sent him to a clinic in Switzerland, where he remained for a year. In 1940, he and his mother emigrated to the United States, settling in Connecticut where he acted with a touring company, joined a drama school and had an affair with fellow student Hurt Hatfield. In 1941, he met the photographer George Platt Lynes, posing for a series of nude photographs that surfaced decades later after he became famous. Following the United States’ entry into World War Two, he worked as a radio announcer for the US Office of War Information, broadcasting to Nazi-occupied France and the Soviet Union. In 1941 photographer. He made his Broadway debut in a 1941 production of Shakespeare‘s Twelfth Night, and appeared in his first film, Port of New York, in 1949. His breakthrough came when he originated the role of Mongkut the King of Siam in the Rogers & Hammerstein musical The King and I. Opening on Broadway in 1951, it was a critical and commercial success, winning him a Tony Award. He also had a discreet affair with his co-star Gertrude Lawrence, who was 21 years his senior. He repeated his role in the 1956 screen version, co-starring Deborah Kerr, winning an international fanbase and an Oscar. Tall and powerfully built, with a shaved head, chiseled bone structure and a deep resonant voice, he became an unlikely sex symbol, with a smouldering charisma reminiscent of Rudolph Valentino and Clark Gable. He had further success as Egyptian pharaoh Rameses in Cecil B. DeMille’s Biblical epic The Ten Commandments, and played a Russian confidence trickster in Anastasia opposite Ingrid Bergman (with whom he had a brief affair). His brooding persona was well-utilised as a gunslinger in the 1960 Western The Magnificent Seven. He continued film acting until the mid 1970s, making his most notable final appearance as a robot gunman in the sci-fi thriller Westworld. In later life, he became a photographer, exhibiting and publishing his photographs, and published a cookbook (sub-titled “Food Fit for the King and You”). Married four times, he fathered three children and adopted a further two. As well as Lawrence and Bergman, he also had affairs with Joan Crawford and Judy Garland and a ten-year relationship with Marlene Dietrich. In his memoirs, novelist Manuel Puig claimed to have had an affair with Brynner in Paris, while working on the film Once More With Feeling. Brynner died of cancer in 1985, aged 65.