The Magnificent Seven rode into theaters in 1960 with eight unforgettable faces. Every one of them is now gone. Two died young. One died in a French monastery’s shadow. And one saved Frank Sinatra’s life before being buried near him. Number one belongs to the man on the poster.
The actor with the shaved head, the black wardrobe, and the eyes that did not blink. Yul Brynner played Chris Larabee Adams as a gunfighter who had stopped needing to prove anything to anyone. Every other man on the seven oriented himself around the stillness Brynner brought to the screen. His real life dwarfed the role. He was born Yuliy Borisovich Bryner in Vladivostok, Russia in 1920 into a wealthy Swiss-Russian merchant family whose silver mining fortune the Red Army confiscated when he was two.
He grew up across Russia, China, and France. As a teenager, he spent a year in a Swiss clinic treating an opium addiction. By the time he reached America at 21, he could perform in 11 languages. The King and I made him a global star. He played the King of Siam 4,625 times on stage and won the Academy Award for the 1956 film.
After that, he spent three decades trying to be cast as anyone else. He married four times and disinherited his five children before he died. Leaving everything to his fourth wife, the ballerina Kathy Lee. In September 1983, hours before his 4,000th performance as the King in Los Angeles, doctors told Brynner he had inoperable lung cancer.
He kept performing. His final stage appearance came on June 30th, 1985. His 4,633rd time. He died at New York Hospital on October 10th, 1985, age 65. Months earlier, he had taped a Good Morning America interview that the American Cancer Society edited into a 30-second commercial released only after his death.
The screen opened on his tombstone. His face filled the camera and he said, “Now that I am gone, I tell you, do not smoke.” His ashes were buried on the grounds of the Saint-Michel-de-Bois-Aubry Russian Orthodox Monastery near Luze in the Indre-et-Loire region of France. Chris Adams was the calm at the center of the gunfight.
Yul Brynner was a man who turned his own death into a public service announcement. Two is the king of cool and his story does not begin in Hollywood. It begins on a Navy troop ship in 1949. Steve McQueen played Vin Tanner with only seven lines of dialogue in the original shooting script and he spent the entire shoot trying to steal the camera from Yul Brynner.
He flipped coins during Brynner’s speeches, rattled shotgun shells, and kicked flat the small mounds of dirt Brynner built to stand on. Brynner eventually hired an assistant whose only job was to count how many times McQueen touched his hat while Brynner was speaking. At 30 years old at the premiere, McQueen had already been through more than most actors twice his age.
His father abandoned the family before he was born. Then, his mother left him with farm grandparents in Missouri. A teenage stepfather beat him. At 14, he was sent to a reform school in Chino, California. By 17, he was a US Marine. As punishment for going AWOL, the Marines assigned him to remove asbestos lagging from pipes aboard a Navy troop ship.
Nobody told him what asbestos was. 30 years later, those fibers killed him. After The Magnificent Seven, he became one of the most famous men in the world. The Great Escape, Bullitt, and Papillon followed. By 1974, he was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood. His name appeared on a Charles Manson family hit list.
He had been scheduled to be at Sharon Tate’s house the night of the murders and only escaped because he stopped for drinks with another woman. He carried a gun for the rest of his life. He married three times. Dancer Jill Adams, actress Ali MacGraw, and model Barbara Minty, who married him months before he died.
In late 1978, he developed a cough that would not go away. On December 22nd, 1979, a biopsy gave him a diagnosis of pleural mesothelioma. American doctors told him nothing could be done. He refused. He flew to Mexico for coffee enemas and a cancer drug pressed from apricot pits. In November 1980, he checked into a clinic in Ciudad Juarez under the alias Sam Shepherd for surgery to remove a tumor American doctors had called inoperable.
The operation was reported a success. 12 hours later in the early morning of November 7th, his heart stopped while he slept. He was 50. His body was flown back to Los Angeles and cremated and his ashes were scattered across the Pacific Ocean. Vin Tanner walked into the village the coolest gunslinger in the picture.
Steve McQueen walked into a Mexican clinic under a false name and his heart gave out before he could walk back out. Third on this list grew up working a Pennsylvania coal mine at 16 for $1 a ton. Charles Bronson played Bernardo O’Reilly, the half Irish, half Mexican gunfighter who falls in with the village children.
The scene that pinned him to American memory is the one where the boys call him a coward for taking pay to fight. And Bronson, his voice catching, tells them their fathers carry a heavier load than any man with a gun. He was born Charles Dennis Buchinsky in Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania, the 11th of 15 children of Lithuanian immigrant coal miners.
English was not spoken at home until he started school. His father died when Charles was 10. By 16, he was in the mines himself. World War II pulled him out. He joined the US Army Air Forces in 1943 and flew 25 combat missions as a tail gunner on B-29 bombers in the Pacific. He came home with a Purple Heart and the GI Bill, and he used it to study art in Philadelphia.
A director named Henry Hathaway told him to change his surname during the McCarthy era because Buchinsky sounded Eastern European in the wrong way. He became Bronson. American studios largely ignored him through the 1960s. He had to go to Europe to become a star. Once Upon a Time in the West with Sergio Leone in 1968 made him bigger in France and Italy than anyone except John Wayne.
And by the early 1970s, he was the highest-paid screen actor in the world. He married three times. The marriage that defined him was his second to British actress Jill Ireland. They appeared together in 15 films and raised their children on a 400-acre farm in West Windsor, Vermont, named after their daughter Zuleika.
Jill Ireland died of breast cancer in 1990. Bronson was destroyed by it. He had her cremated, took her ashes home, and placed them inside a hollow walking cane. That cane traveled with him every day for the next 13 years. A hip fracture in 1998 began the long decline. Alzheimer’s disease followed. Charles Bronson died of pneumonia and metastatic lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on August 30th, 2003, age 81.
His family flew him back to Vermont. His grave at Brownsville Cemetery in West Windsor is a flat memorial stone facing Mount Ascutney inscribed with lines from Claire Harner’s 1934 poem, Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep. The walking cane containing Jill Ireland’s ashes was buried with him. Bernardo O’Reilly was the soft heart of the seven.
Charles Bronson carried his wife’s ashes inside a walking cane for 13 years, and then he was buried with the cane. If the image of that cane stays with you, leave a comment with the name of the cast member whose ending struck you hardest. The answers always tell their own story. Four belongs to the man on the other side of the gunsight.
Eli Wallach played Calvera, the smiling philosophical bandit chief who terrorized the village. He made Calvera the most charming villain in any Western of the period, laughing, flirting, and discussing with his victims the burdens of leadership and a payroll he had to meet. Born in Brooklyn in 1915 to Polish Jewish immigrants from Premischl, he grew up on the Italian-American Red Hook docks, where he picked up the accents that would carry his career.
He earned a degree from the University of Texas, served as a US Army medic in World War II, and became a charter member of the Actors Studio alongside Marlon Brando and a young actress named Anne Jackson, whom he would marry in 1948. In 1953, producer Harry Cohn offered him the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity.
He turned it down to do a Tennessee Williams play with Elia Kazan. The part he passed on went to Frank Sinatra, who used it to resurrect his career and win the Academy Award. Wallach said he never regretted the decision. He also never quite forgot it. His marriage to Anne Jackson lasted 66 years and 3 months.
Their three children, Peter, Roberta, and Katherine, grew up in a household where their son later said the children could not always tell whether their parents were rehearsing a Tennessee Williams scene or having an actual fight. Either way, the two of them always forgave each other in minutes, because they were both trained to.
In 2008, a stroke left Wallach blind in his left eye. He kept working anyway. In November 2010, at age 94, he accepted an honorary Academy Award, and became the oldest person ever to receive an Oscar at the ceremony. He died of natural causes at his Manhattan home on June 24th, 2014, age 98. His son Peter told reporters that the best way to honor his father was to put on one of his movies.
The family kept the burial location private. Calvera ruled a village from horseback with a smile and a payroll. Eli Wallach married one woman, stayed with her 66 years, and held his only Oscar at 94 like a man who had been patient. Five was the silent one. James Coburn played Britt, the knife-throwing gunslinger who joined the seven for the challenge alone.
The scene that made him a star takes less than 2 minutes. A cocky gunman insists on a contest. Britt agrees. The knife flies. The other man falls. Britt walks away. Coburn built the whole character on stillness, on the wide-screen power of a man who barely moved. He was born in Laurel, Nebraska, in 1928, the son of an auto mechanic whose garage had gone bankrupt in the Depression.
He served in the US Army during the Korean War era, and studied with Stella Adler in New York. A close friendship with Bruce Lee defined the next decade of his life. When Lee died suddenly in 1973, Coburn served as one of his pallbearers. In the 1980s, severe rheumatoid arthritis began twisting his hands into shapes he could not straighten.
He could not work the way he had. Hollywood mostly forgot about him for a decade. He married Beverly Kelly in 1959 and divorced her in 1979 after 20 years and two children. He married actress Paula Murad in Versailles in 1993 and stayed with her until his death. In 1999 at age 70 and after 40 years in the business, James Coburn accepted the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as a violent alcoholic father in Affliction.
His hands were so swollen he could barely hold the statue. On the evening of November 18th, 2002, at his home in Beverly Hills, he died of a heart attack at 74. Paula said he died in her arms while the two of them were listening to music. She died of cancer less than 2 years later. His ashes were interred at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles, marked by a simple stone bench inscribed with his name.
Britt threw knives in Silence. James Coburn lost the use of his hands, won his only Oscar at 70 with fingers he could no longer close, and died listening to music in his wife’s arms. Six is the youngest gunfighter in the cast and the only one whose character chose not to ride away at the end. Horst Buchholz played Chico, the hot-blooded Mexican boy who tags along after the seven and slowly earns his place.
He is the heart of the picture. Buchholz was a German actor in his first major American role, working in his second language, and he played Chico with a restless hunger nobody else in the cast brought to screen. He was 26 at the premiere and already famous in Europe. Born in Berlin in 1933, he never knew his biological father and took the surname of his stepfather, a shoemaker.
During World War II, the family evacuated him to Silesia to escape the Allied bombings. He ended the war in a foster home in Czechoslovakia and walked himself back to Berlin as a teenager. By 1957, director Helmut Käutner had directed him to the Cannes Best Actor prize for Sky Without Stars, and the German press began calling him the German James Dean.
He turned down the role of Lawrence of Arabia and a follow-up David Lean project. Both went to Peter O’Toole. Those refusals quietly ended his American career. He married French actress Myriam Bru in 1958 and stayed married to her for 45 years. Their living arrangement was unusual. Myriam in Paris, Horst in Berlin, the city he refused to leave.
In February 2003, Buchholz fractured his hip and was admitted to the Charité hospital in Berlin for surgery. The operation went well. He developed pneumonia during recovery and died at the hospital on March 3rd, 2003, age 69. The death was unexpected. Friends had been told he was on the mend. His grave at Friedhof Heerstraße in the Charlottenburg district of Western Berlin sits in Feld 1, Wald 2.
Chico was the boy who chose to stay in the village. Horst Buchholz was a war refugee child who walked himself home to Berlin and chose to die in the same district where his life had taken root. If you are still with me, hit subscribe before the next name. The next gunfighter on this list held a doctorate, wrote a book still assigned in American law schools, and outlived every other gunfighter in the cast.
Seven was the gunfighter who could not stop shaking. Robert Vaughn played Lee, the well-dressed gunslinger on the run from the law and from his own collapsing nerve. The film’s most psychologically honest scene belongs to him. A drunk, late-night confession to two of the Mexican farmers in which Lee admits his hands tremble every time he draws his weapon.
Vaughn was 27 at the premiere, the youngest of the seven gunfighters by a few months. Born at Charity Hospital in New York City in 1932, he was the son of a radio actor and a stage actress who divorced when he was a child. His mother raised him in Minneapolis. He studied journalism at the University of Minnesota, then moved to Los Angeles for a master’s at California State University.
The Young Philadelphians earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor in 1959, and The Magnificent Seven came the year after. What he did next is the detail that reframes everything. While starring on the global television hit The Man from U.N.C.L.E. from 1964 to 1968, playing the secret agent Napoleon Solo to a worldwide audience, Vaughn was simultaneously enrolled at the University of Southern California, writing a doctoral dissertation.
The subject was the Hollywood political blacklist. He earned the Ph.D. in 1970. The dissertation became the book Only Victims, a study of show business blacklisting. It is still in print. American law schools still assign it. He married actress Linda Staab in 1974 and stayed with her for 42 years. The couple adopted two children, Cassidy and Caitlin, and lived for decades in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
In late 2016, he was diagnosed with acute leukemia. The disease moved quickly. He died at home in Ridgefield on November 11th, 2016, Veteran’s Day, surrounded by his family, age 83. A massive Christian burial was held a week later at Saint Mary Roman Catholic Church on Catuna Street in Ridgefield. The interment was private at the family’s direction.
He was the last of the seven gunfighters left alive. Lee could not stop his hands from shaking. Robert Vaughn earned a doctorate, wrote the definitive American book on the Hollywood blacklist, and was the last gunfighter of the seven still walking. Eight is the gunfighter most people forget, and his real life makes the forgetting unforgettable.
Brad Dexter played Harry Luck, the cynical gunslinger who joined the seven because he was convinced Chris was hiding a much bigger reward than he had admitted to. Harry spends the whole film asking about the gold he is sure exists. He dies in Chris’s arms still asking with a flicker of a smile.
He was 43 at the premiere, the oldest of the seven gunfighters. Born Boris Michel Soso in Goldfield, Nevada in 1917, he was the son of ethnic Serbian immigrants from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serbian was his first language. He studied at the Pasadena Playhouse and acted in radio dramas after World War II as Barry Mitchell.
The name Brad Dexter came when John Huston cast him in The Asphalt Jungle in 1950. He was the only one of the seven gunfighters who never broke through. While the others became stars, Dexter stayed a supporting actor. He told a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1965 that acting frustrated him because the actor had no control over his own destiny.
So, he pivoted to producing. Little Fauss and Big Halsy with Robert Redford came in 1970. Lady Sings the Blues with Diana Ross followed in 1972, nominated for five Academy Awards. His personal life was a Hollywood novel. He married singer Peggy Lee in January 1953. The marriage lasted 8 months because she said he barely worked.
Marilyn Monroe was a close confidant. He tried to talk her out of divorcing Joe DiMaggio in 1954 and failed. He married Mary Bogdanovich, heiress to the StarKist Tuna fortune, in 1971 and stayed with her until her death from cancer in 1994. On May 10th, 1964, on a beach on the island of Kauai, during the production of None but the Brave, Frank Sinatra and the wife of the film’s producer were swept out to sea by a riptide.
Brad Dexter swam out after them and stayed in the water for 45 minutes. At one point, Sinatra became separated from him in the swells and murmured, “It is all over. Please take care of my kids. I am going to die.” Two passing surfers helped Dexter drag both swimmers back to shore. The Red Cross awarded Dexter a medal for bravery.
A grateful Sinatra made him vice president of Sinatra Enterprises. Three years later, Dexter advised Sinatra not to marry the 20-year-old Mia Farrow, and Sinatra cut him off. Sinatra never publicly thanked him for the rescue. Brad Dexter died of emphysema at a hospital in Rancho Mirage, California, on December 12th, 2002, aged 85.
His grave sits in section B of Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City. Frank Sinatra is buried in the same cemetery, about 100 yards away. Harry Lux spent the whole film hunting for hidden gold he could not find. Brad Dexter saved Frank Sinatra’s life, was never publicly thanked for it, and now lies in a California desert 100 yards from the man he pulled out of the water.
They rest in the Pacific Ocean, on the grounds of a French monastery, on a Vermont hilltop, in a Berlin churchyard, and in a California desert beside Frank Sinatra.
