But a new exhibition of his work, hot on the heels of a book published last year, will likely give them their due.
Brynner used photography as a way to stay in love with his day job, filling hours spent waiting on film sets by strolling among friends and crew with a Leica slung around his neck. his images reveal a talent for accruing images of subjects utterly at ease in his presence and rare treasures indeed when seen alongside stilted studio publicity visuals.
Via the reflection in a mirror Ingrid Bergman smiles indulgently from her bathroom doorway, a candy-stripe robe tucked neatly around her waist; Frank Sinatra emerges from a helicopter, its blades still pulsing, besuited, fedora-ed and clutching a glass of scotch on the rocks. these are some of the most noted names of the era and – whether in stylish monochrome or courtesy of Kodachrome’s pinks and yellows – they appear rapt and relaxed, exhilarated to be living their kind of life in a sun-drenched, eternal now.
The images for the show were selected from the book put together by his daughter Victoria last year, on the 25th anniversary of Brynner’s death. a photographer herself, and the owner of a fashion production company, she found the process of editing from the 8,000-odd images her father left behind daunting. “It was a long task,” she tells me from her office in Los Angeles, “but a pretty fascinating one, with a lot of surprises.” Hardest to select from were his portraits of Ingrid Bergman: “Isabella [Rossellini] still talks about it, how they had this amazing friendship; that the pictures my father took of her mother were the best, because you can see the depth of feeling between them.”
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