Deborah Kerr, film actress, 86, dies in England
Deborah Kerr, the cultivated Scottish rose beloved in such 1950s blockbusters as “From Here to Eternity,” “The King and I” and “An Affair to Remember,” died Tuesday in Suffolk, England. She was 86 and for many years had battled Parkinson’s disease with the dignified grace and quiet wit she brought to her many roles.
The secret of Kerr’s singular appeal was her devil-may-care peccability. She played ladies who didn’t mind if their tramp showed.
Whether it was as the nun struggling to repress her desire in “Black Narcissus” (1946), the married woman who relished an adulterous roll in the surf with Burt Lancaster in “From Here to Eternity” (1953), the teacher’s wife who beds a student who may be homosexual in “Tea and Sympathy” (1956) or the kept woman drawn to kept man Cary Grant in “An Affair to Remember” (1957), Kerr projected propriety and sexuality.
Her flute-like voice was also unique. She made music out of ordinary dialogue.
Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer, daughter of a Scottish naval officer who served in World War I, was born in Helensburgh, Scotland, in 1921.
Not long after marrying former R.A.F. squadron leader Anthony Bartley in 1945, Kerr was imported to MGM Studios where mogul Louis B. Mayer molded her in the Jeanette MacDonald/Greer Garson form of great lady. “Deborah Kerr/Rhymes With Star” was the promotion given to the demure actress appearing opposite brazen Ava Gardner in “The Hucksters” (1947). They were the genteel girl and the brassy babe vying for Clark Gable’s attention.
She was decorative and unmemorable in prestige pictures such as “King Solomon’s Mines” (1950) and “Quo Vadis?” (1951). It was only after replacing Joan Crawford as the sex-starved Army wife in “From Here to Eternity” (1953) that Kerr made an American film equal to her British work. Her ability to project the contradictory aspects of character helped her to create a new screen archetype, the very proper adulteress.
However varied her Hollywood roles, Kerr delivered performances of greater nuance and depth in the European-made films “The End of the Affair” (1955) – again, as a conscience-stricken adulteress – and “Bonjour, Tristesse” (1958), as a fashion designer provoked by her lover’s daughter.
No other actress – not Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day or Elizabeth Taylor – enjoyed more popular success in the second half of the 1950s than Kerr. In “An Affair to Remember,” an improbably effective romance that is the basis of “Sleepless in Seattle,” she convinced the world that the Empire State Building was the closest place New York had to heaven. In “The King and I” she whistled a happy tune and the world whistled along.