The Historic Figures

While almost all of the people portrayed in The King and I really existed, very little of what is shown about them is accurate. Much of what is presented as fact in Anna's book, The English Governess at the Siamese Court, is fiction or, at best, exaggeration. In fact, she did not write all of it but, under her own name, used things that had been written by others, and the private secretary of King Chulalongkorn wrote, "[she] has supplied by her invention that which is deficient in her memory". Then Margaret Landon wrote Anna and the King of Siam distorting the facts even more. (Landon claimed 75% of what she wrote was fact but admitted she supplied some of her own material.) Landon's book became, in turn, the source for a movie Anna and the King of Siam with Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison and for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I. They made their own changes and the movie which starred Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner made from the musical added even more. The final result was so inaccurate and insulting to the Thais that The King and I has been banned in Thailand. (The books are sometimes available.) John Blofeld said: The King and I was a monstrous edifice of romantic fiction erected on shaky foundations, interesting only because it has received such attention worldwide".

The 1999 movie version of the story, Anna and the King starring Jodie Foster, was designed to be more palatable to 1990s audiences than the frankly racist earlier version, but the Thais still found its script so inaccurate and insensitive they did not allow it to be filmed in Thailand. (It was filmed in Malaysia and was accompanied by a TV documentary biography on A&E, Anna and the King: The Real Story of Anna Leonowens.)

So enjoy The King and I, which is a wonderful show with glorious music, but remember it is fiction, not history.

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