Starting with his Broadway hit where Brynner, ‘bald, magnetic, graceful as a great cat’ was credited for making women swoon ‘over his shining dome and smouldering eyes,’ his star image was firmly grounded in physical presence, sex appeal, and baldness. ‘What does this man got?’, Cosmopolitan wondered in 1957, then answering its own question by quoting an anonymous female fan: ‘It's a surge of power like electric current. Women can feel it.’ Brynner's star persona was built on an unabashed display of bodily goods and stylized poses complete with taut muscles and hard, fixed stares. Whether adorned in elaborately decorated Oriental costumes of silks and pelts, the elegant apparel of a dandy, or little else than a leather loincloth, his bodily presence was designed to stand out.

Masculine appeal and heterosexual prowess became key to Brynner's star image while, at around the same time – and in equally mythical manner – his fantastic, cosmopolitan tales of origin became central to its constitution. Mapping the secret of his appeal in their 1956 cover feature, ‘Yul Brynner: Why Do Women Find Him Irresistible?’, Collier's – in a familiar rhetorical move – evoked the figure of Rudolph Valentino.