Despite the range of ethnicities and nationalities that Brynner played during his career, his roles were largely variations of a type. Typecasting was, on the one hand, an external constraint. As Brynner stated, ‘I’m not exactly a clean-cut All-American type. […] And so […] I play a lot of strange characters in a lot of strange lands.’ On the other hand, this was a plan of action that he knowingly operated by repeatedly taking on roles of bastards with a heart of gold. Within these, one recurring character type was that of an idealistic leader and/or warrior resisting tyrannical forms of governance; another being that of a tyrannical governor and/or warrior serving tyrannical forms of governance.

This chapter examines Brynner's ethnic characters from Russian military men and Cossacks to ‘Cajun’ gunslingers, Arab and Indian freedom fighters, and German army officers from the 1950s to the 1970s. Focusing on the characters’ introduction scenes in particular, and exploring reviews of his performances, it maps out the types that Brynner's pan-ethnic star persona became associated with and inquires after recurrent elements in his performance style.

Playing Russian

As already discussed in Chapter 2, many of the first roles that Brynner was rumored to take on following his Broadway breakthrough were Russian ones. He played multiple Russian characters throughout his career, both speaking and singing in Russian onscreen, yet his star image did not become associated with, or reduced to these. His career took off in a highly polarized political Cold War context where being identified as Russian would, in all likelihood, have severely limited his casting options. With the execution of the Rosenbergs for Soviet espionage in 1953, the McCarthy hearings of 1954, and the extensive blacklisting of left-leaning Hollywood professionals, roles available to Russian actors were largely limited to historical and emigrant parts on the one hand, and to communist villains, military types and spies, on the other. As Harlow Robinson points out, similar to other outsider groups, Russians were depicted throughout the Cold War through political and ethnic stereotyping designed to support dominant US worldviews.