Born in Scotland, raised in England, becoming a major international star in postwar Hollywood, this gracious and graceful auburn-haired beauty had a name that was often mispronounced. But not by any reader of Richard Wilbur's witty poem on the 1952 MGM version of The Prisoner of Zenda. Stewart Granger, he wrote, 'As Rudolph Rassendyll/ Must swallow a bitter pill/ By renouncing his co-star,/ Deborah Kerr'. In that movie, she played a princess devoted to noblesse oblige. Her first starring role was as a strong-willed, working-class Lancashire lass in Love on the Dole (1941), but her forte was embodying upper-middle-class virtues such as responsibility, duty, reserve, self-sacrifice, probity. Appropriately she was, off-screen, an officer's daughter and then an officer's wife.
She played nuns (the head of a troubled Himalayan convent in the Powell-Pressburger Black Narcissus, a sister stranded on a Second World War atoll in Huston's Heaven Knows, Mr Allison), governesses (Walter Lang's The King and I, Jack Clayton's The Innocents, her greatest performance), devoted, if unappreciated wives (Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy, Kazan's The Arrangement
Yet there was always something pulsatingly sexual beneath that controlled, superego surface and, in 1953, she descended from the throne of Zenda and it burst forth in what became a iconic cinematic moment. After playing Portia, one of the dutiful patrician wives in Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar (MGM's long-established British star Greer Garson was Calpurnia), she was rolling in the Hawaiian waves with Burt Lancaster in Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity. As the abused wife of a contemptible army officer, she was having a torrid affair with his top sergeant. This was Miss Joan Hunter Dunn fleeing Aldershot for the further shores of New World passion.
Kerr starred opposite Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor, Alan Ladd, Richard Burton, Gregory Peck and Kirk Douglas, twice with Stewart Granger, Burt Lancaster and Yul Brynner, thrice with Cary Grant, Robert Mitchum and David Niven. Then she suddenly retired from the cinema in 1970 while still at the top. Elia Kazan, who directed her return to the stage in 1953 in Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, said: 'She was everything good in a woman: kind, understanding, sensitive, wise, gentle, considerate, helpful, funny, upholding - and very bright. I'm talking about Deborah herself as well as Deborah in the part.'
Kerr on herself 'I'm really rather like a Jersey cow. I have the same droop to the corner of my eyes.'
Fred Zinnemann on From Here to Eternity 'Up to that point, Miss Kerr had played ladies who had what Hollywood calls "class" and rather chilly class at that.'
Kerr on that beach scene 'It had to have rocks in the distance so the waves could strike the boulders and shoot upwards - all very symbolic. The scene turned out to be deeply affecting on screen but God it was no fun to shoot.'
Essential DVDs The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, From Here to Eternity, The King and I, An Affair to Remember, The Innocents
Next week: Dean Martin
