Actress;
Born September 30, 1921;
Died October 16, 2007.


DEBORAH Kerr, who has died at the age of 86, was without doubt one of the greatest film stars ever to come out of Scotland.

She famously rolled in the surf with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity (1953), she could have danced all night with Yul Brynner in the musical The King and I (1956) and was nominated for the best actress Oscar on no fewer than six different occasions.

Six nominations without a single win is a bitter-sweet record in the Oscar history books, but they remain a fantastic achievement in themselves. The Academy finally gave her an honorary award in 1994 and the citation captured the essence of her qualities over almost half a century on the big screen, describing her as "an artist of impeccable grace and beauty".

Despite the distinctive red hair, Kerr is less readily recognised as a Scot than Sir Sean Connery, certainly less universally recognised. She left her homeland at a young age and was repeatedly cast as an English rose.

She is more readily associated with the prim governess of The King and I and the crippled, self-sacrificing heroine to Cary Grant's hero in An Affair to Remember (1957), than she is with the lusty, adulterous wife in From Here to Eternity, even though that surf scene is one of the most famous in the history of the movies.

Toss in a couple of nuns and it is no surprise that Kerr's enduring image has been one of dignity and serenity. But her resume is punctuated with roles that illustrate her range and her readiness to tackle challenging material.

In one of her earliest films, Love on the Dole (1941), she was a Lancashire mill girl who succumbs to the overtures of a rich admirer after the death of her sweetheart. It was made two decades before such issues were addressed by the kitchen-sink dramas and social realist cinema.

Twenty-eight years later she showed her chutzpah and much else besides when she stripped off for Elia Kazan's The Arrangement, another tale of adultery, co-starring Kirk Douglas and Faye Dunaway. Kerr was in her late forties by this point, at a time when nudity was still relatively unusual in Hollywood films.

The daughter of a civil engineer, she was born Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer in 1921 in a nursing home in Glasgow. She spent her earliest years in Helensburgh, routinely cited as her place of birth.

She trained as a dancer initially at her aunt's school in Bristol and made her debut with Sadler's Wells Ballet while in her teens. But she soon turned to drama, had a short spell with a repertory company in Oxford and made her film debut in Powell and Pressburger's wartime thriller Contraband (1940), though her scenes were cut out.

Powell and Pressburger made amends by giving her no fewer than three starring roles in their classic 1943 film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, an epic and, at the time, controversial celebration of British military pluck, honour and eccentricity.

The film spans the era from the Boer War to the Second World War. Kerr is the woman who officer Roger Livesey loves and loses (to a German officer, no less), and she also plays two further women who attract his attention further down the line.

By that time, Kerr had had starring roles in Love on the Dole and an adaptation of A J Cronin's Hatter's Castle (1942), in a rare role as a Scot, but Blimp put her very much centre stage and showcased both her beauty and her talent.

Having served up three variants on the idealised sweetheart in Blimp, she played a nun in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947) before heading for Hollywood.

She secured her first Oscar nomination as Spencer Tracy's alcoholic wife in Edward, My Son (1949) and appeared in such glittering blockbusters as King Solomon's Mines (1950), Quo Vadis (1951), The Prisoner of Zenda (1952) and Julius Caesar (1953), alongside the young Marlon Brando.

But it was From Here to Eternity that propelled her to the very top ranks of Hollywood actresses. After From Here to Eternity and The King and I, further Oscar nominations followed for Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (1957), Separate Tables (1958) and The Sundowners (1960).

She returned to England to play another prim governess in The Innocents (1961), a chilling adaptation of the Henry James ghost story The Turn of the Screw. But the quality of Kerr's films fell away rather badly in the 1960s and she virtually retired at the end of the decade. In 1997 she was made a CBE.

Kerr was seen as easy to work with, but she said: "I'm neat and tidy. I hate it when things are a mess. You could say I'm neat and tidy inside and out. I've never played a slut, although I was a bit ruffled in The Sundowners." In 1945, Kerr married Anthony Bartley, who she had met when he was a squadron leader in the Royal Air Force. They had two daughters and divorced in 1959. A year later, she married Peter Viertel, a novelist-screenwriter. Initially they lived in Switzerland and Marbella, but Kerr later returned to England as her Parkinson's disease worsened. She is survived by Viertel and two daughters from her first marriage.