Picaresque Past

Mr. Brynner also brought a sense of theatrics to his own life story. ''I am just a nice clean-cut Mongolian boy,'' he once put it. The deadpan comment only hinted at his picaresque past, one Mr. Brynner often embroidered with tall tales. In one yarn, he claimed to have fought with Loyalist forces during the Spanish Civil War and in another to have supported himself for a time as a jai-alai player.

''Who cares if all the stories he has told about himself are true or not?'' a colleague of Mr. Brynner's once said. ''He colors everything he does. It's just Yul. He sees things as he wants to see them. I once horrified him by saying, 'I'm so bored.' He said, 'How can you be bored? There's no time to be bored.' ''

Mr. Brynner was born on Sakhalin Island, off the coast of Siberia, to a Mongolian mining engineer and his Rumanian gypsy bride. At different times, Mr. Brynner gave the date of his birth as July 11 in 1915, 1917, 1920 and 1922. He spent his childhood in Sakhalin, Peking and Paris, where he dropped out of a boarding school at the age of 13 and began his performing career as a circus acrobat.

He left that vocation only after he injured himself seriously - he said he suffered 47 fractures - in an accident. ''I became a circus actor,'' he later recalled. ''But it was depressing working on the ground. I still wanted to fly.''

After a stint supporting himself as a singer and guitarist, Mr. Brynner joined a French acting troupe in 1934. He came to the United States in 1941 and, barely fluent in English, learned his first role - Fabian, in a touring company of ''Twelfth Night'' - from a dictionary.

His career proceeded slowly for the next decade. Mr. Brynner won some praise for his Broadway role as the poet Tsai-Yong in ''Lute Song'' in 1946, but he was rejected after a screen test at Universal in 1947 for looking ''too Oriental.''