‘The King and I’ Spotlights an English Governess Who Modernized Siamese Society. The Real Anna Leonowens Exaggerated Her Influence and Lied About Her Origins

The beloved musical is loosely based on a Eurasian schoolteacher’s accounts of her time at King Mongkut’s court. These memoirs masked her mixed-race status and unfairly portrayed the monarch as a tyrant

Meilan Solly | Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

March 27, 2026

Gertrude Lawrence as Anna Leonowens and Yul Brynner as the king of Siam in the 1951 Broadway production of The King and I — Gertrude Lawrence as Anna Leonowens and Yul Brynner as Mongkut in the 1951 Broadway production of *The King and I*. The musical turns 75 on March 29. Photo by John Springer Collection / Corbis via Getty Images

Seventy-five years ago, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I introduced audiences to a plucky British governess who singlehandedly reformed Siamese society through sheer force of will. In the 1951 Broadway musical’s telling, Anna Leonowens—a real historical figure whose life was fictionalized for the stage—refused to submit to the titular king’s whims and outdated views on issues such as slavery and women’s status in society. Instead, in her role as schoolteacher to the royal children, she laid the foundation for the next generation to adapt Western reforms, eventually winning over the king and his successor.

Loosely based on the 1946 film Anna and the King of Siam, itself an adaptation of Margaret Landon’s 1944 novel of the same name, the show was a smash hit. A 1956 film version starring Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr further cemented The King and I’s place in popular culture, propelling its leading man to international fame.

As Laurence F. Maslon, an arts professor at New York University, says, the musical “came out of this post-World War II fascination with the East,” as reflected in Broadway hits like South Pacific and The Teahouse of August Moon. The King and I’s portrayal of the enlightened West triumphing over the supposedly uncivilized East “made it very palatable and … very much a Cold War avatar of how people, certainly on Broadway, wanted to see a kind of world perspective,” Maslon tells Smithsonian magazine.

But few viewers realized that the musical’s depiction of historical events was highly misleading, in large part because of the real Leonowens’ efforts to mask the truth about both her own origins and her time at King Mongkut’s court in the 1860s.

“She knew that her readers in the United States knew very little about Siam, and she wanted to make her position at the court look sort of precarious and exhausting,” says Alfred Habegger, author of the 2014 biography Masked: The Life of Anna Leonowens, Schoolmistress at the Court of Siam. “She had a habit of dressing up her prior life, improving it, changing it, making it more interesting. … She was determined to present herself in as dignified a way as possible.”

Far from being the Welsh-born widow of a British major, Leonowens was actually the mixed-race daughter of an Anglo-Indian mother and a British father, meaning she occupied a tenuous position in Victorian society. Eager to reinvent herself after the death of her husband, an Irish-born soldier of lesser military rank, Leonowens created a new backstory that emphasized her impeccable ancestry and education. Later, she applied this same penchant for invention to her nearly six years in Siam (now Thailand), casting Mongkut as the tyrannical foil to her Western savior.

A photo of the 1977 production of The King and I, starring Yul Brynner and Constance Towers — A photo of the 1977 production of *The King and I*, starring Yul Brynner and Constance Towers Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The 75th anniversary of The King and I’s Broadway premiere on March 29, 1951, finds the musical at a crossroads, condemned by some as a colonialist relic and praised by others as a feminist tale of triumph over a domineering male authority figure. Against this backdrop, recent research on Leonowens offers a glimpse behind the curtain, revealing the flawed yet tenacious woman behind the character immortalized on the stage and the screen.

The real Anna Leonowens

In a brief autobiography written for her grandchildren later in life, Leonowens suggested that she’d been “born in Wales, in the old homestead of an ancient Welsh family named Edwards, the youngest daughter of which, my mother, accompanied her husband, Thomas Maxwell Crawford, to India, while I was left in charge of an eminent Welsh lady, Mrs. Walpole, a distant relative of my father, to be educated in Wales.” After her father’s death at the hands of Sikh rebels, Leonowens claimed that her mother married a man whose “domestic tyranny” prompted her to leave home at age 15 and travel abroad.

This account, which was also circulated publicly to promote Leonowens’ speaking engagements, turned out to be rather fanciful. But scholars only started uncovering evidence of the fabrications a century later, in the 1970s. “Anna herself has been the greatest obstacle to discovering anything of her personal history,” biographer Susan Morgan wrote in her 2008 book, Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the King and I Governess. “She threw away or destroyed any records, family letters or souvenirs and replaced them with lies.”

Anna Leonowens, circa 1862 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

In truth, Leonowens was born in the British-controlled Bombay Presidency in 1831. Her father, a British sergeant, died before she was born, and her mother quickly remarried an Irishman from the same regiment. Leonowens was the maternal granddaughter of an English officer who’d likely married an Indian woman while stationed in British India in the early 19th century. Such relationships weren’t uncommon, but they placed these couples’ children—among them Leonowens’ mother—in a difficult position.

“There was a good deal of prejudice against mixed-race people, especially if their skin tone was a little bit darker than most Europeans,” as Leonowens’ was, Habegger tells Smithsonian. As he wrote in Masked, “Anna’s embarrassment about her family lineage is hardly surprising. In a society bound by rigid rules of propriety, respectability and social status, there was a keen sense of shame.”

Habegger’s research indicates that Leonowens learned to blend in with high society while attending a local boarding school for the mixed-race daughters of British soldiers. As a teenager, she fell in love with a young military clerk named Thomas Leon Owens (later styled as one word). The couple wed on Christmas Day in 1849. But tragedy struck when their firstborn child died before her second birthday, under unknown circumstances. (Leonowens had a total of four children, two of whom, Avis and Louis, survived to adulthood.) In search of a new start and better economic opportunities, the pair set out for Australia in late 1852. Five years later, the family relocated again, first to Singapore and then to Penang, in what is now Malaysia, where Thomas managed a hotel.

In 1859, Thomas died suddenly, leaving Leonowens a 27-year-old widow with two young children to support. She returned to Singapore, where she opened a small school and seemingly shed her past. Leonowens decided to begin presenting herself to the world as a “genteel and scholarly widow” who’d been forced to cut ties with her family because her stepfather disapproved of her marriage, Morgan wrote in Bombay Anna. “The beauty of Anna’s story, her virtually uncheckable story, was that all it required was that she be able to act the part” of a well-born British lady—a role she believed she was fully equipped to play.

Leonowens later in life, with two of her grandchildren Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Anna Leonowens and King Mongkut of Siam

Leonowens’ nursery school wasn’t financially successful. But it had the desired effect of establishing her as an educator. When Thomas’ former boss William Adamson learned that the king of Siam, whom he’d befriended while living in the Southeast Asian kingdom, was looking for someone to teach English to his children, he immediately thought of Leonowens.

“Adamson was familiar with the king’s oddities and could imagine what it would be like working for him,” Habegger wrote in Masked. “A governess fresh from Britain would not be up to that, but there was a woman in Singapore who might be—his late clerk’s struggling widow. On the instant, Mrs. Leonowens’ vague origins, wanderings, travails and odd authority were converted from liabilities to assets.”

Leonowens and 5-year-old Louis sailed into Bangkok in March 1862, just under 11 years after Mongkut succeeded his older half-brother Rama III. He’d been expected to take the throne upon the death of his father, Rama II, in 1824, but the council chose his more seasoned brother instead—a controversial accession that Leonowens later characterized as a usurpation. Mongkut spent his brother’s reign out of public view in a Buddhist monastery, an experience that molded him into “a kind of philosopher-king, with all that this term implies of good and bad: principled and far-sighted but also, at times, impractical and high-handed,” Habegger wrote.

King Mongkut of Siam in Western dress Wellcome Collection under CC BY 4.0

As king, Mongkut was more open to modernizing reforms and Western influence than his predecessors, and he prided himself on his understanding of science. He was quick to anger and quite eccentric, especially in the eyes of Westerners, but he was far from the despot that Leonowens believed him to be.

Much of what Leonowens wrote about her years in Siam is unreliable or exaggerated at best and entirely falsified at worst. Leonowens’ account of her first meeting with Mongkut, for example, suggests she was responsible for educating all of the king’s children, in addition to teaching English to his wives and assisting him with his correspondence. (Polygamy was widely practiced in Siam until 1935, and Mongkut had a total of 82 children by 35 wives.) In actuality, most of the royal children were too young for schooling, and Leonowens only started handling the king’s correspondence a year or two after her arrival in Bangkok.

Did you know? Mongkut and Abraham Lincoln

In 1861, Mongkut sent President James Buchanan a letter offering to gift several pairs of elephants to the United States, where the animals could be “turned loose in forests and increase till there be large herds.”
Buchanan’s successor, Abraham Lincoln, responded to the offer the following year, politely declining because “our political jurisdiction … does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant.”

Even the title of Leonowens’ 1870 memoir, The English Governess at the Siamese Court, was inaccurate: She’d never been to England and had no close family there, and as Habegger points out, she wasn’t described as a governess in official paperwork, as this title would’ve entailed broader duties. Although Leonowens eventually attained a degree of influence in Siam, even joining the ranks of minor nobility, “the few mentions of her in court documents suggest that she was seen as something of a prig and a nuisance,” wrote scholar Susan Kepner in a 1996 journal article.

Still, Habegger noted in Masked, Leonowens’ accounts contain “authentic patches” that illuminate aspects of Mongkut’s reign. “He tried to educate his wives,” the author tells Smithsonian. “He wanted to introduce them to the modern world, and Anna was a way of helping him achieve that goal.”

Mongkut, his wife Debsirindra and several of his children Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps the most shocking incident detailed by Leonowens is the trial and execution of Tuptim, a young woman whom she claimed was forced into sexual slavery. One day, Tuptim disappeared from the palace compound where she and the king’s other wives lived, only to be found hiding at a monastery with her presumed lover.

According to Leonowens’ 1873 book, The Romance of the Harem, officials tortured both Tuptim and her lover in hopes of forcing them to confess their guilt, presenting a heart-wrenching tableaux that led the schoolteacher to beg the king for mercy on their behalf. In response, Leonowens wrote, he told her that she was mad “and, fixing a cold stare upon me, he burst out laughing in my face.” Mongkut eventually agreed to grant her request but changed his mind after learning the details of the purported crimes.

“Not knowing how to punish me except by showing me his absolute power of life and death over his subjects,” Leonowens wrote, the king “ordered the scaffolds to be set up before my windows.” The anecdote ends with her fainting, only to awaken to “a thick mist loaded with sepulchral vapors”—the remnants of Tuptim and her lover being burned alive right outside of the schoolteacher’s home.

The 1956 film adaptation of The King and I featured Rita Moreno (seen here lying on the floor, to the right of Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr) as Tuptim. — The 1956 film adaptation of *The King and I* featured Rita Moreno (seen here sitting on the floor, to the right of Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr) as Tuptim. Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images

Tuptim’s story is dramatized in all three major movie adaptations of Leonowens’ life, with her punishment differing in each one, from burning at the stake to beheading to a last-minute reprieve from a whipping. Yet none acknowledge that the original tale was itself a fabrication. Leonowens drew “on hearsay that was fleshed out by [her] memory and imagination and the drama’s intrinsic demands,” Habegger wrote. She had pieced together disparate rumors that predated Mongkut’s reign to paint him as a petty, sex-crazed tyrant.

This depiction of the king reflected Leonowens’ personal history and agenda more than the truth of Mongkut’s character. (The king had, in fact, issued a decree allowing concubines who weren’t mothers to resign from their roles and remarry—a major reform for the era.) Kepner, who explained Leonowens’ later disavowal of her stepfather by suggesting that he’d been abusive, argued that the schoolteacher saw Siamese court as “one great, dazzling Rorschach blot of an institution; the closer she looked, the surer she was of what she saw: a tyrannical, omnipotent ‘father’ surrounded by frightened girls who lived in constant terror of his brutish advances.”

Leonowens’ negative portrayal of Siam also stemmed from her opposition to the institution of slavery. “She obviously clashed with the Thai elite, who had a very different worldview and conduct about people’s rights at the time,” independent scholar Somrit Luechai told Reuters in 2019.

Mongkut's arrival at Wat Pho in 1865 Wellcome Collection under CC BY 4.0

When Leonowens wrote her recollections of Mongkut’s court, in the 1870s, she did so with the financial support of abolitionists who had a vested interest in propping her up as the main reason for the end of slavery in Siam. Historians, however, don’t attribute the antislavery reforms enacted by Mongkut’s son and successor, King Chulalongkorn, solely to Leonowens’ schoolroom lessons. Instead, they point to an array of factors, chief among them his father’s influence. (An area in which Leonowens had more luck, according to Habegger, was encouraging Chulalongkorn to ban the practice of prostration, in which the king’s subordinates prostrated themselves in front of him as a sign of respect.)

How Anna Leonowens inspired Anna and the King of Siam

Leonowens left Bangkok in July 1867, ostensibly with plans to return after taking some time off for her health. Instead of returning to India or any of her other former homes, she set sail for New York City. She was accompanied by her older daughter, Avis, newly retrieved from a boarding school in London; Louis, meanwhile, was sent to a school in Dublin.

About a year after Leonowens’ arrival in the U.S., her former employer contracted malaria while leading an expedition to view a solar eclipse. Mongkut died in October 1868, at 63, leaving the throne to his teenage son Chulalongkorn. No longer considering a return to Siam, Leonowens instead turned her attention to a new opportunity: writing a tell-all book that capitalized on her unique perspective as a Western woman embedded in Siamese court.

Chulalongkorn's coronation portrait — Chulalongkorn's 1873 coronation portrait Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

A series of essays published in the Atlantic heightened public anticipation for The English Governess at the Siamese Court, which was generally well received in the U.S. but disparaged in Britain, where a reviewer criticized it as “not only valueless but even dangerously misleading.” Leonowens followed up her initial account with an even more fanciful one, The Romance of the Harem, then supplemented the profits from her books by lecturing and teaching.

Freed from the stigma of her humble origins, Leonowens ran in elite literary circles, crossing paths with the likes of poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But her fame was relatively short-lived. She spent most of her later life out of the public eye in Canada, where she cared for her daughter and grandchildren. Her death in 1915, at 83, went unrecorded in major American newspapers like the New York Times, and an obituary published in the London Times referred to her mainly as the mother of Louis, who was by then a successful businessman.

In 1930, Landon, an American missionary, came across Leonowens’ first book while serving in Siam. Entranced by this portrait of a bygone era, Landon tracked down Leonowens’ granddaughter, who shared the schoolteacher’s personal papers, including her heavily fictionalized autobiography. Landon drew on these materials, supplemented with substantial research into Siamese history, to create a novelistic account that she published under the title Anna and the King of Siam in 1944.

Margaret Ayer illustration for Margaret Landon's 1944 novel, Anna and the King of Siam — Margaret Ayer's illustrations for Margaret Landon's 1944 novel, *Anna and the King of Siam*, shaped the public perception of Leonowens. *Springfield Weekly Republican* via Newspapers.com

Featuring modernized dialogue and evocative illustrations that solidified the image of Leonowens as a traditional Victorian governess, the book presented its subject’s fanciful claims as undisputed truth. As Landon wrote in an author’s note, “If I were asked to give the fabric content of the book, I should say that it is ‘75 percent fact and 25 percent fiction based on fact.’”

The making of The King and I

Anna and the King of Siam was a best seller. In 1946, Twentieth Century Fox released a movie adaptation starring Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne in the title roles. The Oscar-winning film caught the eye of Gertrude Lawrence, a British actress in search of a splashy new role. She approached Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II with the idea of turning Landon’s book into a Broadway musical.

“Although she was a pretty big star, Rodgers in particular, who was pretty meticulous, felt that she was not the best singer in the world,” Maslon, the NYU professor, tells Smithsonian. Still, the songwriting duo agreed to tackle the project, taking care to work around their leading lady’s tendency to sing off-key. They found the king to rival Lawrence’s governess in Yul Brynner, a then relatively unknown television director suggested by one of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s former stars.

Of Russian and Swiss descent, Brynner—much like Leonowens—created a new background for himself, claiming Mongolian and Roma ancestry. “He just was so different and ‘exotic’ that they cast him immediately,” Maslon says. On opening night in March 1951, Lawrence received top billing, making it evident which character was the true focus of the show. (The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery houses an ink drawing of Lawrence and Brynner in character in its collections; other Smithsonian artifacts related to The King and I include a ceremonial mask created for the 1996 Broadway revival of the musical and programs from different productions of the show.)

When writing The King and I, Rodgers and Hammerstein “didn’t do a lot of research about Siam,” Maslon says. “Rodgers was given some sort of introduction to Asian harmonies, and he was like, ‘Yeah, thanks, but I have to write a show that sounds like Broadway, not like traditional Siamese or Thai music.’” To compose songs that would resonate with Western audiences yet feel noticeably different from the duo’s typical soaring melodies, Rodgers employed open fifth chords, staccato beats and chords in unexpected keys.

This technique was most evident in “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” a balletic number that features Tuptim’s retelling—with liberties taken—of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Choreographed by Jerome Robbins, who would later earn accolades for his work on West Side Story, the song builds to a terrifying moment in which Eliza, the heroine of Beecher Stowe’s novel, finds herself boxed in by a river while fleeing from her enslaver, Simon Legree.

“Who can save her?” Tuptim asks as the chorus frantically intones, “Run, Eliza. Run from Simon.” The answer, in Tuptim’s telling, is the grace of Buddha, who sends down an angel to turn the river into ice, enabling Eliza’s escape. The sequence is perhaps the musical’s most memorable, dramatically underscoring the parallels between Eliza and Tuptim and Simon and the Siamese king, who keeps Tuptim in bondage instead of letting her marry the man she loves.

Based on a movie adaptation of a novel that dramatized Leonowens’ already heavily fictionalized accounts, The King and I wasn’t particularly concerned with historical accuracy. Arguably the biggest change made by Rodgers and Hammerstein was the addition of an unspoken attraction between the musical’s title characters—a dynamic with no basis in the written record.

Songwriting duo Richard Rodgers (left) and Oscar Hammerstein II (right) Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

“They were writing a romance in the context of a cultural conflict,” Maslon says. “I don’t think they felt the need to be incredibly meticulous and accurate about the setting. They wanted to tell a story, and that’s the story they chose to tell.” The overarching question posed by The King and I, in Maslon’s view, is what “people who are of opposite opinions about entire cultures [are] able to negotiate with one another.”

The original Broadway production of The King and I was a success, in no small part thanks to its two stars, both of whom won Tony Awards for their work. But tragedy struck in the second year of the show’s run, when Lawrence fainted backstage after a matinee performance. She died of previously undetected liver cancer three weeks later, at 54.

On her deathbed, Lawrence reportedly told her agent to “see that Yul gets star billing. He has earned it.” This request came to fruition, with Brynner going on to portray the king in both the 1956 film adaptation of the musical and multiple stage revivals. Between 1951 and 1985, when Brynner died of lung cancer at 65, he performed on stage in his signature role a staggering 4,625 times.

Lawrence and Brynner in The King and I — Lawrence and Brynner in *The King and I* Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

It wasn’t until after Lawrence’s death that the musical really transitioned into a story of “two equal characters,” Maslon says. “When it opened, it was this great, glorious female star and this interesting guy who is a supporting actor.” But Brynner, he adds, is the one who “wound up inheriting the mantle of the show.”

The complicated legacy of The King and I

In a 1956 letter to Rodgers, Hammerstein praised The King and I as “our best work.” He continued, “I have a kind of humble feeling of not knowing how we did it. It has more wisdom as well as heart than any other musical play by anybody. It will remain ‘modern’ long after any of our other plays.”

Whether modern audiences agree with this assessment remains the subject of debate. More recent revivals have tried to distance themselves from the whitewashed casting of earlier productions: The 1996 Broadway staging, for example, was the first to cast actors of Asian descent in all of the show’s Asian roles—a practice continued by the widely praised 2015 revival, which starred Japanese actor Ken Watanabe as the king and Kelli O’Hara as Leonowens. The sets and costumes of these productions reflected greater attention to historical fidelity, and many of the actors took care to avoid veering into caricature with their performances.

Watanabe’s version of the king was more politically savvy than previous iterations, emphasizing the difficult position the real Mongkut found himself in when resisting colonization by European powers. “The king struggles to work with other countries,” the actor told Backstage magazine in 2015. “It’s a warrior’s concern, and as current events [demonstrate], the challenges in working with international partners are very serious and far from comedic.”

The 2015 production also reinstated “Western People Funny,” a song cut from the 1956 movie and many subsequent Broadway productions. In the number, the king’s chief wife, Lady Thiang, reflects on the absurdity of European clothing, singing, “To prove we’re not barbarians / They dress us up like savages!” She adds, “They think they civilize us / Whenever they advise us / To learn to make the same mistake / That they are making too!”

As Bartlett Sher, the revival’s director, told BBC News in 2015, “The song makes a lot of sense now. It’s an ironic commentary about how the West judges the East.” Ruthie Ann Miles, the actress playing Thiang, echoed this sentiment, saying, “I was so pleased Bart put the number back in, because it balances things out.”

Despite these attempts to bring The King and I into the 21st century, some critics of the show argue that it’s hopelessly outdated, irrevocably marred by its central narrative of a Western governess singlehandedly “civilizing” a supposedly “lesser” culture.

In a 2021 essay for American Theater, writer Sravya Tadepalli proposed revamping the show’s script to acknowledge Leonowens’ Eurasian background. “While Anna brazenly attempts to bring human rights to Siam, her own internalized racism and desperation to pass as white would remind audiences that the West is responsible for its own cruel racial hierarchies and indignities,” Tadepalli argued. “Her charade would illustrate the hypocrisy of the white man’s (or woman’s) burden.”

In Thailand itself, public sentiment toward both The King and I and Leonowens is overwhelmingly negative. The Thai government banned the 1956 movie and a 1999 film version starring Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat. Censors argued that the 1999 adaptation “has too many scenes which distort history and insult the king”—a violation of defamation laws that protect the Thai royal family’s reputation.

“The artistic team behind The King and I had liberal sympathies, yet if one tries to watch the musical with Thai eyes,” wrote Habegger in Masked, “it becomes an act of colonization—an invasion that seizes not land or material products but a people’s sense of their past.”

While Mongkut didn’t live to read Leonowens’ harsh assessment of his reign, his son Chulalongkorn did. According to Leonowens’ granddaughter Anna Fyshe, the king met up with his former teacher in London in 1897, while on a tour of Europe. Chulalongkorn “expressed great sorrow that she had pictured his father as a ‘wicked old man’ in her books,” Fyshe, who was present at the meeting, recalled. “He said, ‘You made all the world laugh at him. … Why did you do it?’”

Leonowens’ response was straightforward, reflecting the underlying belief of all her writing about the Siamese court. A woman who had rewritten her own past to fit society’s expectations, she had no qualms about presenting a version of events that fit the narrative she wanted to tell. Faced with direct criticism of her fabrications, she simply replied, “Because I had to write the truth.”

Editors’ note, April 1, 2026: This story has been edited to clarify Leonowens’ birthplace.

A newspaper review of Margaret Landon's Anna and the King of Siam — A newspaper review of Margaret Landon's *Anna and the King of Siam* *Times-Herald* via Newspapers.com