Deborah Kerr
Deborah Jane Trimmer, known professionally as Deborah Kerr, was a Scottish film star. Kerr rose to fame for her portrayals of proper, ladylike women, who often navigated societal expectations and stereotypes. Kerr attracted wide praise for her work, earning six Academy Award nominations for Best Actress. She was regarded as one of the best actresses of her generation. From the 1940s to the late 1960s, she was one of the most popular actresses in the world.
Following a brief career as a ballerina, Kerr moved to the stage and acted in various Shakespeare productions and small plays before making her film debut in Major Barbara. This led to additional leading roles which raised her profile, such as Love on the Dole, Hatter's Castle, and The Day Will Dawn. In 1943, Kerr played three women in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's romantic-war drama The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which consistently ranks among the greatest British films of all time. Following major successes in the spy comedy I See a Dark Stranger and psychological drama Black Narcissus, Kerr transitioned to Hollywood under the helm of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.
Following the lukewarm success of her debut Hollywood features, The Hucksters and If Winter Comes, both in 1947, Kerr found critical praise in Edward, My Son, for which she received her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, becoming the first Scottish person to be nominated for an acting Oscar. Though she found major commercial success in King Solomon's Mines and Quo Vadis, the latter the highest grossing film of 1951, reviews were often lackluster for her performances, highlighting her typecasting. In 1953, Kerr had a critical resurgence in the major hit From Here to Eternity, which reestablished her as a serious actress and earned her a second Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
Throughout the 1950s, Kerr starred in a string of major commercial and critical successes. She earned three consecutive Academy Award nominations for The King and I, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, and Separate Tables. She also appeared in the progressive drama Tea and Sympathy, in which she had starred on Broadway in 1953. Later, the romantic classic An Affair to Remember. By the 1960s, her career had slowed, though she remained somewhat prominent in film due to successful roles in The Sundowners, The Grass Is Greener, The Innocents, The Chalk Garden and The Night of the Iguana. She made sporadic appearances in films and television until The Assam Garden in 1985, which was her final film role.
Kerr received numerous accolades throughout her career, including two Golden Globe Awards and nominations for six Academy Awards, four British Academy Film Awards, and an Emmy Award. 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."
Early life
Deborah Jane Trimmer was born on 30 September 1921 in Hillhead, Glasgow, the only daughter of Kathleen Rose 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.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, who became a journalist. He died, aged 78, in a road rage incident in 2004.
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. She adopted the name Deborah Kerr on becoming a film actress.
Early career
Early theatre and film
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.Kerr's first film role was in the British production Contraband, aged 18 or 19, but her scenes were cut. She had a strong supporting role in Major Barbara directed by Gabriel Pascal.
Film stardom
Kerr became known playing the lead role in the film of Love on the Dole. 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".She was the female lead in Penn of Pennsylvania which was little seen; however Hatter's Castle, in which she starred with Robert Newton and James Mason, was very successful. She played a Norwegian resistance fighter in The Day Will Dawn. 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.
Kerr played three women in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. During the filming, according to Powell's autobiography, Powell and she became lovers: "I realised that Deborah was both the ideal and the flesh-and-blood woman whom I had been searching for". 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!" 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.
Powell hoped to reunite Kerr and lead actor Roger Livesey in his next film, A Canterbury Tale, 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.
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".
Near the end of the Second World War, she also toured Netherlands, France, and Belgium for ENSA as Mrs Manningham in Gaslight, and Britain.
Alexander Korda cast her opposite Robert Donat in Perfect Strangers. The film was a big hit in Britain. So too was the spy comedy drama I See a Dark Stranger, 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 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. She relocated to Hollywood and was under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Hollywood
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Kerr's first film for MGM in Hollywood was a mature satire of the burgeoning advertising industry, The Hucksters with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner. She and Walter Pidgeon were cast in If Winter Comes. She received the first of her Oscar nominations for Edward, My Son, a drama set and filmed in England co-starring Spencer Tracy.In Hollywood, Kerr's British accent and manner led to a succession of roles portraying refined, reserved, and "proper" English ladies. Kerr, nevertheless, used any opportunity to discard her cool exterior. She had the lead in a comedy Please Believe Me.
Kerr appeared in two huge hits for MGM in a row. King Solomon's Mines was shot on location in Africa with Stewart Granger and Richard Carlson. This was immediately followed by her appearance in the religious epic Quo Vadis, shot at Cinecittà in Rome, in which she played the indomitable Lygia, a first-century Christian.
She then played Princess Flavia in a remake of The Prisoner of Zenda with Granger and Mason. In between Paramount borrowed her to appear in Thunder in the East with Alan Ladd.
In 1953, Kerr "showed her theatrical mettle" as Portia in Joseph Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar. She made Young Bess with Granger and Jean Simmons, then appeared alongside Cary Grant in Dream Wife, a flop comedy.
''From Here to Eternity'' and Broadway
Kerr departed from typecasting with a performance that brought out her sensuality, as Karen Holmes, the embittered American military wife in Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity, for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. The American Film Institute acknowledged the iconic status of the scene from that film in which she and Burt Lancaster romped illicitly and passionately amidst crashing waves on a Hawaiian beach. The organisation ranked it 20th in its list of the 100 most romantic films of all time.Having established herself as a film actress in the meantime, she made her Broadway debut in 1953, appearing in Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, for which she received a Tony Award nomination. Kerr performed the same role in Vincente Minnelli's film adaptation released in 1956; her stage partner John Kerr also appeared. In 1955, Kerr won the Sarah Siddons Award for her performance in Chicago during a national tour of the play. After her Broadway début in 1953, she toured the United States with Tea and Sympathy.