Original subtitles

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.