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Deborah Kerr: England
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Deborah Kerr, one of the great ladies of mid-20th century cinema, who epitomized grace and intelligence on screen, has died. Her death, in Suffolk, England, was announced on Thursday by her agent. She was 86.
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Deborah Kerr, the flame-tressed beauty who was one of the most luminous stars of her time, has died at age 86. A victim of Parkinson's disease, she died Tuesday in Suffolk, England, where she had moved from her longtime home in Switzerland to be near her daughters and grandchildren.
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Trained as a dancer at her aunt's drama school in Bristol, England, Kerr wona scholarship to the Sadler's Wells ballet school and at seventeen made her London debut among the corps-de-ballet in Prometheus. She soon discovered... that she was more interested in drama and began playing small roles invarious Shakespearean productions. In the early 1940s, she made her British film debut as the Salvation Army girl, Jenny Hill, in the movie version of George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara. Other film roles followed in which she typically played cool and reserved well-bred ladies. In 1946, on the strength ofher sensitive portrayal of a nun in Black Narcissus, she was brought to Hollywood by Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer to play the lead opposite Clark Gable in The Hucksters. She retained her serene, ladylike image on the American screen through a series of genteel roles in such films as If Winter Comes, Young Bess, King Solomon's Mines, and Quo Vadis.
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In her later years Kerr suffered from Parkinson's Disease and returned to England to be near her family. In 2004 her younger brother, Edmund Trimmer, died in a road-rage attack. Kerr had two daughters, Melanie Jane and Francesca Ann, from her marriage to Anthony Bartley (divorced 1959). Her grandsons are actors Tom and Lex, and writer Joe Shrapnel (Francesca's sons). Deborah married novelist and screenwriter Peter Viertel in 1960. Deborah Kerr died on October 16, 2007 from complications associated with Parkinson's.
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Kerr moved into leads in an adaptation of the controversial novel which was England's equivalent of The Grapes of Wrath, the touching study of Depression-era poverty, Love on the Dole (1940). Although she did well in films, including the grim Hatter's Castle (1941), it was really Kerr's lovely work in three roles in the splendid Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger time-spanning saga The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), as the various women in the hero's life, that really set her on top. She followed up with several excellent performances in fine films: the mousy wife whose marriage is revitalized when she enters wartime service in Perfect Strangers (1945); the Irish spy in the gripping I See a Dark Stranger (1946); and especially, a marvelous, award-winning performance as the determined yet fallible Sister Superior who attempts to establish a school and hospital in a remote Himalayan castle in Powell and Pressburger's uniquely unsettling Black Narcissus (1947).
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Adultery was a theme of a rather greater book, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair (1954), which brought Kerr back to England. An underrated film, it suffers from a miscast, rather lightweight Van Johnson as the writer, but she and a fine British cast save the day.
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