In the fall of 1985, television viewers were startled by a ghost. Yul Brynner, gaunt but still unmistakably commanding, stared into the camera and delivered a warning from beyond the grave: “Now that I’m gone, I tell you, don’t smoke. Whatever you do, just don’t smoke. ” Four months earlier, the swaggering, proudly bald star who had enthralled audiences for decades had succumbed to lung cancer at sixty-five.

That brief anti-smoking commercial, released after his funeral, became his final performance. Brynner loved a good myth, especially about himself. He spun tales of being born Taj Khan, son of a Mongolian prince and a Roma gypsy on the Russian island of Sakhalin. All smoke and mirrors.

In reality, he was born July 11, 1920, in Vladivostok. His father’s family had Swiss German and Buryat Mongol roots, and his maternal grandfather was a Russian Jew who had converted to Orthodox Christianity. But for Brynner, mundane facts were never enough. Vladivostok at his birth was a city in turmoil, caught between retreating White armies and advancing Bolsheviks.

The Brynner family had been wealthy industrialists, but revolution and civil war stripped them of their fortune. Life remained comfortable until 1924, when his father abandoned the family for a younger lover. The heartbreak broke his mother, Marousia, who fled with her two children to Harbin, the Manchurian city with a large community of Russian exiles. There, young Yul was mesmerized by a Chinese opera star who performed in drag, a man in elaborate female costume singing and dancing on stage.

The idea that one could become someone else through sheer performance took root early. By the early 1930s, Japanese expansion threatened Manchuria. The family moved again, this time to Paris. Brynner enrolled in school, but academics held little charm.

Far more influential were the city’s music halls and cabarets. One night he heard wandering Russian gypsy musicians, and by fourteen he had taught himself the guitar and was performing Roma folk songs in Parisian nightclubs. At sixteen, he joined a touring circus as an acrobat, swinging from a trapeze until a serious back injury left him in agony. To cope, he turned to opium.

By seventeen, he was a secret addict. One twilight drug transaction led to an encounter with Jean Cocteau, the famed poet and fellow opium addict. Through Cocteau, Brynner met Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Josephine Baker. But his family intervened, checking him into a clinic in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he underwent a year of experimental treatment, including hypnotherapy.

It worked. He emerged clean, vowing never to touch drugs again. In beating one addiction, he acquired another: cigarettes, a crutch he would lean on heavily for the rest of his life. Around this time, his estranged father reappeared, inviting Yul to stay after his convalescence.

His new stepmother, a former performer with the Moscow Art Theater, became his first acting coach, teaching him to use voice and body to convey emotion. Impressed by his talent, she wrote a letter of recommendation to Michael Chekhov, who ran an acting school in the United States. In the autumn of 1940, after his mother fell ill and needed treatment in New York, mother and son sailed for America. Brynner studied with Chekhov in Connecticut and worked odd jobs at night.

In December 1941, he made his Broadway debut in Twelfth Night, cast in a minor role because his English was still shaky. The attack on Pearl Harbor closed many shows, but the experience was invaluable. With the United States entering World War II, Brynner’s fluency in French and Russian landed him work as a radio announcer for the Office of War Information, broadcasting Allied propaganda to Nazi-occupied France and the Soviet Union. During the war years, acting work was sporadic.

In 1944, he appeared in a touring production with Mary Martin, and that same year married actress Virginia Gilmore. They soon had a son. But Brynner was restless, charismatic, and magnetic to others. Fidelity was not his strong suit.

Desperate for cash in the early 1940s, he posed naked for famed photographer George Platt Lynes, artistic shots that could have been career-ending in the prudish Hollywood era. He kept the episode quiet for decades. Those whispers trailed him. While studying acting in 1941, Brynner had grown extremely close to a handsome fellow student, Hurd Hatfield, later the star of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Classmates quietly confirmed the two were for a time romantically involved. Brynner never publicly acknowledged it, and he became adept at balancing unconventional private appetites with a carefully crafted public image. His big break arrived courtesy of Mary Martin. In 1950, she heard that Rodgers and Hammerstein were auditioning for a new musical, The King and I, and recommended Brynner for the lead role of King Mongkut.

At first he hesitated, having found success as a television director at CBS. But reading the script hooked him. The character, proud, curious, tyrannical yet vulnerable, fascinated him. Rehearsals brought one defining decision: his hair.

The costume designer felt the King of Siam should appear shaved-headed to emphasize his authoritarian control. Brynner was convinced he would look terrible bald. Only during out-of-town tryouts did he finally give in. The effect was electrifying.

The angular shaved-head look became his trademark for the rest of his life, and barbers reported men requesting the Yul Brynner look. When The King and I premiered on Broadway in March 1951, Brynner was virtually unknown. The star was Gertrude Lawrence, the glamorous British actress playing Anna. But almost from opening night, it was clear a new star had arrived.

Brynner won the 1952 Tony Award. Offstage, the thirty-five-year-old Brynner and the fifty-two-year-old Lawrence were having an affair. Then tragedy struck in September 1952, when Lawrence collapsed and died from liver cancer. Brynner was devastated.

With Lawrence gone, he became the undisputed star. By the time the show closed in 1954, he had played the King 1,246 times. Hollywood came calling. Brynner reprised his role in the lavish 1956 film adaptation opposite Deborah Kerr, winning the Academy Award for Best Actor.

That same year, he appeared in no fewer than three other major films: The Ten Commandments as Pharaoh Rameses II, Anastasia as a suave Russian conman opposite Ingrid Bergman, and a minor crime drama. By the end of 1956, he was one of Hollywood’s most in-demand leading men. In 1960, he traded royal robes for a cowboy hat, headlining The Magnificent Seven as Chris Adams, the taciturn leader of seven gunmen hired to defend a Mexican village. Onscreen, the camaraderie felt authentic.

Offscreen, a bitter feud brewed between Brynner and up-and-coming star Steve McQueen. McQueen, chafing at having few lines, began upstaging Brynner during filming, tipping his hat, fiddling with his shotgun shells, and even scuffing away the dirt mounds Brynner stood on to appear taller. One day, Brynner snapped, grabbing McQueen by the shoulder and pulling him aside. Their rivalry went down in Hollywood lore.

By the early 1960s, Brynner moved his family to Switzerland and took up Swiss citizenship. His personal life grew increasingly tumultuous. His marriage to Virginia Gilmore ended in 1960, and he immediately married Doris Kleiner, though he was linked romantically to Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, and Joan Crawford. His second marriage crumbled by 1967.

In 1971, he married the French socialite Jacqueline de Beque, and they adopted two infants from Vietnam. By 1981, that marriage too had failed. In 1973, Brynner starred in Westworld, a science fiction film about a futuristic amusement park where lifelike robots malfunction and kill the guests. His role as the gunslinger, a black-clad robotic cowboy deliberately modeled on his Magnificent Seven persona, created one of the most chilling villains of the 1970s.

It was his last major film role. In 1983, at sixty-two, Brynner married for the fourth time. His bride was Kathy Lee, a twenty-four-year-old ballerina from Malaysia he had met during a King and I revival. Around this time, he began experiencing bouts of ill health.

A lifetime of relentless smoking, reportedly up to five packs a day, was finally exacting its price. In September 1983, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Characteristically, he decided to go out on stage. In 1984, defying medical advice, he embarked on a farewell tour of The King and I.

Audiences packed theaters, sensing they were witnessing the swan song of a legend. Backstage, his lungs were so damaged he needed an oxygen tank between scenes. On June 30, 1985, Brynner performed The King and I for the 4,625th time, his final bow. Less than three months later, on October 10, 1985, he died in a New York hospital.

That same morning, Orson Welles also passed away. As per his wishes, the American Cancer Society began airing a thirty-second spot derived from his final television interview. In it, a somber Brynner addresses posterity: “Now that I’m gone, I tell you, don’t smoke. Whatever you do, just don’t smoke.

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The ad ran countless times on American and international television, a haunting echo from a man who had transformed himself into a cautionary figure, using his own death to teach others the value of life.