Deborah Kerr

Deborah Jane Trimmer CBE (30 September 192116 October 2007), known professionally as Deborah Kerr (), was a British actress. She was nominated six times for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

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".

Early life

Deborah Jane Trimmer was born on 30 September 1921 in Hillhead, Glasgow, 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.

Young Deborah spent the first three years of her life in the 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 ("Teddy"), 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, 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 ("Kerr" was a family name going back to the maternal grandmother of her grandfather Arthur Kerr Trimmer).Braun, Eric. ''Deborah Kerr''. St. Martin's Press, 1978. .

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'' (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.

Film stardom

Kerr became known playing the lead role in the film of '' Love on the Dole'' (1941). Said critic James Agate of ''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'' (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.

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: "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'' (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.

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 Holland, France, and Belgium for ENSA as Mrs Manningham in ''Gaslight'' (retitled ''Angel Street''), and Britain (with Stewart Granger).

Alexander Korda

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