Deborah Kerr
Deborah Jane Trimmer[1] CBE (30 September 1921 – 16 October 2007), known professionally as Deborah Kerr (/kɑːr/), was a British actress. She was nominated six times for the Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first person from Scotland to be nominated for any acting Oscar.
For other uses, see Deborah Kerr (disambiguation).
Deborah Kerr
During her international film career, Kerr won a Golden Globe Award for her performance as Anna Leonowens in the musical film The King and I (1956). Her other major and best known films and performances are The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Black Narcissus (1947), Quo Vadis (1951), From Here to Eternity (1953), Tea and Sympathy (1956), An Affair to Remember (1957), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Separate Tables (1958), The Sundowners (1960), The Innocents (1961), The Grass Is Greener (1960), and The Night of the Iguana (1964).
In 1994, having already received honorary awards from the Cannes Film Festival and BAFTA, Kerr received an Academy Honorary Award with a citation recognizing her as "an artist of impeccable grace and beauty, a dedicated actress whose motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and elegance".[2]
Early life[edit]
Deborah Jane Trimmer[1] was born on 30 September 1921 in Hillhead, Glasgow,[3] the only daughter of Kathleen Rose (née Smale) and Capt. Arthur Charles Kerr Trimmer, a World War I veteran and pilot who lost a leg at the Battle of the Somme and later became a naval architect and civil engineer. Trimmer and Smale married, both aged 28, on 21 August 1919 in Smale's hometown of Lydney, Gloucestershire.[4][5]
Young Deborah spent the first three years of her life in the Scottish west coast town of Helensburgh, where her parents lived with Deborah's grandparents in a house on West King Street. Kerr had a younger brother, Edmund Charles (born 31 May 1926), who became a journalist. He died, aged 78, in a road rage incident in 2004.[6][7]
Kerr was educated at the independent Northumberland House School, Henleaze in Bristol, England, and at Rossholme School, Weston-super-Mare. Kerr originally trained as a ballet dancer, first appearing on stage at Sadler's Wells in 1938. After changing careers, she soon found success as an actress. Her first acting teacher was her aunt, Phyllis Smale, who worked at a drama school in Bristol run by Lally Cuthbert Hicks.[8][9] She adopted the name Deborah Kerr on becoming a film actress ("Kerr" was a family name going back to the maternal grandmother of her grandfather Arthur Kerr Trimmer).[10]
Early career[edit]
Early theatre and film[edit]
Kerr's first stage appearance was at Weston-super-Mare in 1937, as "Harlequin" in the mime play Harlequin and Columbine. She then went to the Sadler's Wells ballet school and in 1938 made her début in the corps de ballet in Prometheus. After various walk-on parts in Shakespeare productions at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park, London, she joined the Oxford Playhouse repertory company in 1940, playing, inter alia, "Margaret" in Dear Brutus and "Patty Moss" in The Two Bouquets.[8]
Kerr's first film role was in the British production Contraband (US: Blackout, 1940), aged 18 or 19, but her scenes were cut. She had a strong support role in Major Barbara (1941) directed by Gabriel Pascal.[11]
Film stardom[edit]
Kerr became known playing the lead role in the film of Love on the Dole (1941). Critic James Agate wrote that Love on the Dole "is not within a mile of Wendy Hiller's in the theatre, but it is a charming piece of work by a very pretty and promising beginner, so pretty and so promising that there is the usual yapping about a new star".[8]
She was the female lead in Penn of Pennsylvania (1941) which was little seen; however Hatter's Castle (1942), in which she starred with Robert Newton and James Mason, was very successful. She played a Norwegian resistance fighter in The Day Will Dawn (1942). She was an immediate hit with the public: an American film trade paper reported in 1942 that she was the most popular British actress with Americans.[12]
Kerr played three women in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). During the filming, according to Powell's autobiography, Powell and she became lovers:[13] "I realised that Deborah was both the ideal and the flesh-and-blood woman whom I had been searching for".[13] Kerr made clear that her surname should be pronounced the same as "car". To avoid confusion over pronunciation, Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer billed her as "Kerr rhymes with Star!"[14] [15] Although the British Army refused to co-operate with the producers—and Winston Churchill thought the film would ruin wartime morale—Colonel Blimp confounded critics when it proved to be an artistic and commercial success.[13]
Powell hoped to reunite Kerr and lead actor Roger Livesey in his next film, A Canterbury Tale (1944), but her agent had sold her contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. According to Powell, his affair with Kerr ended when she made it clear to him that she would accept an offer to go to Hollywood if one were made.[13]
In 1943, aged 21, Kerr made her West End début as Ellie Dunn in a revival of Heartbreak House at the Cambridge Theatre, stealing attention from stalwarts such as Edith Evans and Isabel Jeans. "She has the rare gift", wrote critic Beverley Baxter, "of thinking her lines, not merely remembering them. The process of development from a romantic, silly girl to a hard, disillusioned woman in three hours was moving and convincing".[8]
Near the end of the Second World War, she also toured Holland, France, and Belgium for ENSA as Mrs Manningham in Gaslight (retitled Angel Street), and Britain (with Stewart Granger).[16]
Alexander Korda cast her opposite Robert Donat in Perfect Strangers (1945). The film was a big hit in Britain. So too was the spy comedy drama I See a Dark Stranger (1946), in which she gave a breezy, amusing performance that dominated the action and overshadowed her co-star Trevor Howard. This film was a production of the team of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat.
Her role as a troubled nun in the Powell and Pressburger production of Black Narcissus (1947) brought her to the attention of Hollywood producers. The film was a hit in the US, as well as the UK, and Kerr won the New York Film Critics Award as Actress of the Year. British exhibitors voted her the eighth-most popular local star at the box-office in 1947.[17] She relocated to Hollywood and was under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Television[edit]
Kerr experienced a career resurgence on television in the early 1980s when she played the role of the nurse (played by Elsa Lanchester in the 1957 film of the same name) in Witness for the Prosecution, with Sir Ralph Richardson. She also did A Song at Twilight (1982).[29]
She took on the role of the older Emma Harte, a tycoon, in the adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance (1985). For this performance, Kerr was nominated for an Emmy Award.[30]
Kerr rejoined old screen partner Mitchum in Reunion at Fairborough (1985). Other TV roles included Ann and Debbie (1986) and Hold the Dream (1986), the latter a sequel to A Woman of Substance.[31]
Personal life[edit]
Kerr's first marriage was to Squadron Leader Anthony Bartley RAF on 29 November 1945. They had two daughters, Melanie Jane (born 27 December 1947) and Francesca Ann (born 18 December 1951, who married the actor John Shrapnel). The marriage was troubled, owing to Bartley's envy of his wife's fame and financial success,[10] and because her career often took her away from home. They divorced in 1959.
Her second marriage was to author Peter Viertel on 23 July 1960. In marrying Viertel, she became stepmother to Viertel's daughter, Christine Viertel. Although she long resided in Klosters, Switzerland, and Marbella, Spain, Kerr moved back to Britain to be closer to her own children as her health began to deteriorate. Her husband, however, continued to live in Marbella.[32]
Stewart Granger said in his autobiography that in 1945 she had approached him romantically in the back of his chauffeur-driven car at the time he was making Caesar and Cleopatra.[33] Although he was married to Elspeth March, he states that he and Kerr went on to have an affair.[34] When asked about this revelation, Kerr's response was, "What a gallant man he is!"[35]