Deborah Kerr, 86; embodied elegance for filmgoers
WASHINGTON - Deborah Kerr, 86, a Scottish-born actress who set the standard for white-gloved elegance in such 1950s films as "The King and I" and "An Affair to Remember" and who shocked viewers as the lusty adulteress in "From Here to Eternity," died Tuesday in Suffolk, England. She had Parkinson's disease.
Ms. Kerr, who appeared in nearly 50 films, was nominated six times for the best actress Academy Award but did not win. She received an honorary career Oscar in 1994.
In her most popular roles, she usually was genteel and quietly forceful opposite rugged male performers such as Burt Lancaster and Robert Mitchum. Her biographer, Eric Braun, wrote that she excelled in parts that conveyed "moral fortitude concealed by a frail appearance."
She was so well-known for her onscreen grace that People magazine once rehashed a Hollywood joke about her: "Deborah Kerr is the sort of creature who could be photographed ambling, disheveled, out of a place of assignation, or doing the hully-gully, naked, on the Golden Gate bridge, and draw no more comment from the public than, 'Lovely girl.' "
Ms. Kerr insisted her acting range was much broader than many of her critics would allow. She reminded generations of reporters that she had played "everything from nuns to nymphos," the latter referring to "From Here to Eternity" (1953).
She credited that film with being her breakthrough role after a series of early 1950s costume dramas in which she was a plucky English heroine. The film was based on James Jones's steamy 1951 novel set just before the Pearl Harbor attack.
She had hired a new agent to persuade Columbia studios boss Harry Cohn she would be right for the role of Karen Holmes, the unfaithful wife of a base captain who falls for a sergeant.
According to Ms. Kerr's biography, Cohn laughed at the thought of the cultured actress as Holmes. Two things soon changed his mind: the demands of Joan Crawford, who was originally set to play Holmes, and director Fred Zinnemann's desire to cast against type.
To prepare for the part, Ms. Kerr spent months learning a flat American accent, dyed her hair blonde, and went through an entire studio make-over, complete with cheesecake publicity shots.
Audiences were stunned to see her in a passionate embrace in the sea foam with Burt Lancaster as the muscular sergeant. That scene became a defining moment of uninhibited sensuality portrayed in 1950s cinema - and for decades was much-lampooned in television skits and films.
In addition to "From Here to Eternity," Ms. Kerr was Oscar-nominated for playing a businessman's alcoholic wife in "Edward, My Son" (1949) and an English widow who tutors the King of Siam's children in the musical "The King and I" (1956).
She also was nominated as a nun stranded on an island with a Marine Corps corporal during World War II in "Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison" (1957); an insecure woman dominated by her mother in "Separate Tables" (1958); and as an Australian sheep-drover's steadfast wife in "The Sundowners" (1960).
The last showed Ms. Kerr's powerful but subtle character shadings, namely through her sad and envious stare at a rich, beautiful woman on a passing train.
Meanwhile, Ms. Kerr excelled in glamorous roles. She was three times a graceful female counterpart to the suave Cary Grant, in the comedies "Dream Wife" (1953) and "The Grass is Greener" (1960). There was also "An Affair to Remember" (1957), regarded by many critics and movie enthusiasts as the best of the three filmed versions about shipboard lovers engaged to others but who find true love with each other. That love is then jeopardized by tragic events.
Ms. Kerr would go on to appear in "Beloved Infidel" (1959) as Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham; "The Innocents" (1961), about a repressed governess in charge of two supernaturally possessed children; Tennessee Williams's "The Night of the Iguana" (1964) as a deeply spiritual artist who confronts a defrocked priest; and Elia Kazan's "The Arrangement" (1969) as the wife of a faithless ad executive.
In the 1960s and 1970s, she turned down cameo roles in the all-star disaster films then in vogue. She also voiced disdain for the public appetite for gratuitous nudity onscreen. A stand-in did her nude scene with Lancaster in John Frankenheimer's drama "The Gypsy Moths" in 1969.
Her final movie role was the lead in Mary McMurray's well-received "Assam Garden" (1985), as a tart-tongued widow of an English officer.
Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer was born in Helensburgh, Scotland. Her father, a civil engineer, died when she was 14 of wounds suffered in World War I. She, her mother and a younger brother settled in Bristol, England, where she trained at a drama school run by her aunt.
Ms. Kerr's stage career led to a supporting part in the 1941 screen version of the George Bernard Shaw play "Major Barbara."
She appeared in about 10 films during the next six years and became one of Britain's leading actresses. Her most important early film was "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" (1943), in which she played three generations of increasingly liberated women.
That ability to display wide emotional range was a crucial demand of "Vacation From Marriage" (1945), a film in which she transforms during wartime from the mousy wife into a woman of glamour and independence.
What clinched her appeal to Hollywood producers was her portrayal of an inflexible nun in "Black Narcissus" (1947), a sexually provocative drama of a religious order in a Himalayan outpost.
Louis B. Mayer at MGM studios soon signed Ms. Kerr to replace the fading star power of London-born beauty Greer Garson.
Ms. Kerr's impact was immediate. She received the New York Film Critics best actress award for her first American part, in "The Hucksters" (1947), as a widow who attracts a cynical Madison Avenue executive (Clark Gable).
"From Here to Eternity" brought her to the front rank of actresses. The film was an enormous success, earning Zinnemann an Oscar for direction and Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed the award for supporting acting categories. It also won best picture of the year, but Ms. Kerr lost the Oscar to newcomer Audrey Hepburn in "Roman Holiday."
In 1986, Ms. Kerr told the Chicago Tribune she was not disappointed by being overlooked during subsequent Oscar ceremonies.
"Quite the opposite, in fact, as I'm sure I've had more mileage out of it than if I'd won the damned thing," she said. "Can you remember who won two years ago, or four? No, but people always remember my Oscar record, and they also point out what good company I'm keeping, what with Chaplin, Garbo, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire . . ."
In addition, "From Here to Eternity" brought her one of her plum stage roles, as a boarding school official's neglected wife in "Tea and Sympathy." Kazan directed her in the 1953 Broadway production - considered racy for its time - in which she sexually initiates a student who is teased for his apparent homosexuality.
In one sequence, her character unbuttons her blouse and tenderly tells the student as the lights fade, "When you speak of this in future years, and you will, be kind."
Her marriage to the World War II British flying ace Anthony Bartley ended in divorce.
She leaves her husband, the author Peter Viertel, whom she married in 1960; two daughters from her first marriage; and three grandchildren.
