 Brynner also worked as a model, television director and photographer, and was the author of several books.Yul Brynner was born Yuliy Borisovich Briner on July 11, 1920, in the city of Vladivostok in the Far Eastern Republic, a puppet state controlled by Soviet Russia before being merged into the wider USSR two years later.He had Swiss-German, Russian and Buryat (Mongol) ancestry, and was born at home in a four-story residence at 15 Aleutskaya Street, Vladivostok.