Yul Brynner’s son Rock has died: the actor and writer loved to come to Vladivostok

Wore my dad’s boots from The Magnificent Seven there

On October 13, Rock Brynner, an actor, writer, historian, son of the famous Hollywood artist with Russian roots, Yul Brynner, died. For five years he struggled with a serious illness – myeloma. Rock became for many years the mascot of the Pacific Meridian festival, held in Vladivostok, where his father was born.

Starting in 2003, as soon as the festival appeared, Rock Brynner came there constantly until he became ill. During his first visit, he walked the streets of Vladivostok in his father’s boots, which Brynner Sr. wore in the film “The Magnificent Seven.” Rock brought them specially to do what his father failed to do. He visited the house where Yul Brynner was born. Now there is a memorial plaque there. Rock traveled along the railway, which was built in Primorye by his ancestor Julius Brynner. And at the festival, he graced the star track with his presence, met with the audience, and gave lectures. At the second festival, I slightly frightened my colleagues when, during a boat ride, I scattered ashes brought from the USA. Over the years, we can no longer remember whose ashes it was, whose will it carried out, but we all escaped the surprise and the scattering decay on another deck.

Rock Brynner was born on December 23, 1946 in the USA and became the only child of Yul Brynner and American actress Virginia Gilmore. His father won an Oscar for his role in The King and I. Movie stars gathered in their house. Rock himself didn’t do anything. It was already in adulthood that he received a PhD from Columbia University, and before that he drove a taxi, was a clown and actor in Dublin and London, worked on Broadway, performed gypsy songs in Paris. He organized the Rolling Stones tour, acted as a translator for boxer Muhammad Ali and accidentally became his bodyguard, although it’s hard to even imagine knowing the Rock’s physique.

Like his father, Rock renounced his American citizenship and became a citizen of Switzerland, where their ancestors came from. I did this because I didn’t want to fight in Vietnam. Years later, it took effort to become a US citizen again. Rock wrote several books where he remembered his youth and talked about his father’s life – “Yul: the man who could have been a king!” About his famous family, he wrote the work “Empire and Odyssey: Brynners in the Russian Far East and Beyond.” He also has a novel about global warming and several plays. He co-authored The Oxford Companion to American Military History.

Yul Brynner died in 1985 from lung cancer, and for some time Rock did not know where his ashes were buried. He studied archives related to his ancestors and discovered many interesting facts in the family tree. His grandfather married a Russian. And in the possessions of our ancestors there were Far Eastern mines. Lenin turned to his grandfather Boris so that during the years of Soviet power the work there would not stop – there were no specialists. He wrote about his father’s wanderings around the world, his flight as a child to Harbin, and the subsequent ups and downs in his book.