Yul Brynner

With his smooth skull and his dark velvet eyes, Yul Brynner has durably marked with his silhouette, the cinema of the 50s and 70s. The cosmopolitan actor, popularized by The Seven Mercenaries or The Ten Commandments, has always kept his attachment to France where he lived from 1934 to 1941. At the dawn of the 1960's, after having filmed Le Testament d'Orphée under the direction of Jean Cocteau, he acquired Le Manoir de Cricquebeuf in the heart of the Pays d'Auge, at Bonnebosq, twenty kilometers from Deauville. It was during this same period that he developed a passion for photography.

For more than 25 years, the geographical proximity of his summer home to the city of Les Planches made Yul Brynner, accompanied by Doris, his second wife, a very present personality in Deauville. As a photographer inspired by the abundance of summer activity and events, he was both one of the actors and one of the privileged witnesses. From 1959 to 1985, he never missed an opportunity to take remarkable portraits or atmospheric photos on the film sets. The friend and accomplice of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Jacques Henri Lartigue, will immortalize with his Leica, the great events of the summer in Deauville: Françoise Sagan and Sophie Litvak at the races (1961), Elie de Rothschild playing polo... The shooting ofAimez-vousBrahms? a film by Otto Preminger with Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Perkins and Yves Montand. 

A privileged witness of the creation of the American Film Festival, he will receive a tribute at the fourth edition, in 1980, when one of the lices of the Planches bathing cabins will be named after him.