Post by avalon on Oct 19, 2007 8:52:10 GMT 9.5
She was such a classy and talented lady.
may she rest in peace.
your huge fan Avalon/Nessa
Deborah Kerr
Last Updated: 1:20pm BST 18/10/2007
Page 1 of 3
"An artist of impeccable grace and beauty "
Academy Award citation
Deborah Kerr, star of From Here To Eternity, died on Tuesday in Suffolk, England. She was 86.Her death was announced to The Associated Press by her agent, Anne Hutton. She had Parkinson’s disease.
Kerr was the unfadingly ladylike and prototypical English rose whose red-haired, angular beauty and self-possessed femininity distinguished more than 50 films in four decades of cinema.
Kerr: "prototypical English rose"
She made serenity dramatic; and though her poise might be ruffled at critical moments in scenes of passion (most famously exemplified by her encounter on the beach with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity in 1953), her well-bred airs and social graces made her a model of British womanhood in Hollywood.
Her best-known film was probably The King and I, in which she played a haughty governess opposite Yul Brynner's Siamese monarch; and her principal problem as an accomplished actress was to convince Hollywood of her sensual potential. Although she herself was a more spirited, relaxed and informal person than her image on the screen suggested, producers were reluctant to cast her in passionate roles.
Nevertheless, when they came her way - as they did after From Here to Eternity - her type of refined sensuality proved refreshingly attractive, since it hinted at hidden desires and forbidden feelings, giving her acting an extra edge and interest.
If she still looked more at ease on screen as a nun than as a nymphomaniac, or as a governess rather than a seductress, Deborah Kerr loved to hint at what she called "banked fires", the volcano steaming away beneath the ice cap. And though she used merrily to deny that in younger days she had tried to seduce one of her old co-stars, Stewart Granger, in the back of a London cab (as he asserted in his autobiography), it was the contrast between her very British gentility and her sexual vulnerability that often gave her screen persona its savour.
She was born Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer, the daughter of Captain Arthur Kerr-Trimmer, at Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire, on September 30 1921 and educated in Bristol, where she attended a drama school run by her aunt, Phyllis Smale.
Her 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 walking on in various Shakespeare productions at the Open-Air Theatre, Regent's Park, she joined the Oxford Playhouse repertory company in 1940, playing, inter alia, Margaret in Dear Brutus and Patty Moss in The Two Bouquets.
Her first film appearance was in Michael Powell's Contraband (1939), though her scenes were deleted from the final release; but with her next two British films - Major Barbara and Love on the Dole (both 1941) - her screen future seemed assured.
Her performance, said 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'."
After Hatter's Castle (1941) and The Day Will Dawn (1942) the "yapping" grew so loud that by the time Deborah Kerr reached the West End in a revival of Heartbreak House (Cambridge Theatre, 1943) the drama critics were ready to dismiss her as an impostor from the cinema.
In the event, she stole attention as Ellie Dunn from stalwarts such as Edith Evans and Isabel Jeans. She was only 21. "She has the rare gift," wrote the 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."
It was to be 29 years before Deborah Kerr returned to the London stage, and then in such unremarkable and occasional productions as an old-fashioned weepie, The Day After the Fair (Lyric, 1972), a Peter Ustinov comedy, Overheard (Haymarket, 1981) and a revival of Emlyn Williams's The Corn is Green.
On the pre-London tour of The Corn is Green she needed so much prompting on the first night in Bath (she had been laid low with a tummy bug) that she was booed. It was rather as if, wrote one critic, a bishop had been debagged in the Athenaeum. But when the show reached the Old Vic in 1985 she found a cautious welcome as the determined schoolmistress who brought enlightenment to the dark south Wales valleys at the turn of the century
Not that her theatrical record should be judged only by her handful of West End appearances. She liked touring. "I do it because it's exactly like dressing up for the grown-ups," she said. "I don't mean to belittle acting, but I'm like a child when I'm out there on a stage performing - shocking the grown-ups, enchanting them, making them laugh or cry. It's an unbelievable terror, a kind of masochistic madness. The older you get the easier it should be, but it isn't."
After her first London success she toured England and Scotland in Heartbreak House. Near the end of the Second World War she also toured Holland, France and Belgium for Ensa as Mrs Manningham in Angel Street, and Britain (with Stewart Granger) in Gaslight. And after her Broadway début, in 1953, as the schoolmaster's wife who seduces a pupil in Tea and Sympathy, she toured the United States. She also acted, in 1975, in two other American plays: Seascape (New York) and Souvenir (Los Angeles).
While Deborah Kerr's West End plays were few in number, she appeared in more than 50 films. Cast usually in sympathetic roles - as nice girls driven from home by overbearing fathers, or brave young things who defy the enemy - she was ever ladylike and socially assured, but with enough personality to hint at the human being beneath the elegant surface.
In her second film for Michael Powell, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), she appeared as three different women (identical in looks), each of whom seems the ideal woman to the film's hero, Clive Candy, VC (Roger Livesey), at different stages in his life. And as if to show her versatility and contradict assumptions about her nice English loyalties, she played an Irish colleen who spied for the Nazis against Britain in Frank Launder's I See a Dark Stranger (1946).
A nun in the same director's Black Narcissus (1947) was perhaps more in Deborah Kerr's line. At any rate, it brought an invitation from MGM to go to Hollywood, where her roles grew less interesting as the type-casting continued. She was a war widow in The Hucksters (1947); an ageing dipsomaniac in Edward My Son (1949); a decorative object in King Solomon's Mines (1950); a dull Christian in Quo Vadis (1951); and an even duller Princess Flavia in The Prisoner of Zenda (1952).
But as Portia in Joseph Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar (1953) Deborah Kerr showed her theatrical mettle, and later that year - in Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity - she showed a new side of her talent, as a captain's wife romping illicitly and passionately on a beach with Burt Lancaster as the tide came in. For this she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress - one of six such nominations she was to receive that were unsuccessful.
The film itself won eight Oscars (including for best picture) and the New York critics chose it as the best film of the year. At last her sensuality had been admitted; it would always be muted by Hollywood standards because of her temperament and personality, but its existence would enrich many future roles - for example, that of the repressed wife in The End of the Affair (1955), with Van Johnson.
Not much of it came through in The King and I (1956), when she played the regal British governess to Brynner's Siamese monarch. Later that year, as a Roman Catholic widow in The Proud and the Profane, she was seduced by William Holden; and in Tea and Sympathy (also 1956), as the wife of a neglectful housemaster, she in turn was the seducer, of one of her husband's pupils.
In Heaven Knows Mr Allison (1957), one of John Huston's best comedies, Deborah Kerr played a nun alone on a desert island who encounters Robert Mitchum as a leering marine; and she had another success, this time opposite Cary Grant, in An Affair to Remember (also 1957).
In Separate Tables (1958) she was a shy spinster who befriended David Niven's bogus major, despite that character's unusual sexual habits. And in Bonjour Tristesse (1958) she played the same actor's mistress whose nice nature was, for once, examined and found wanting.
Deborah Kerr was also the mistress of F Scott Fitzgerald (as played by Cary Grant) in Beloved Infidel (1959). In Prudence and the Pill (1968) she cuckolded her husband (David Niven), and as late as 1969 she was again Burt Lancaster's mistress, in The Gypsy Moths.
As the wife of a peer in The Grass is Greener she was caught philandering with Robert Mitchum; but the couple were happily married for The Sundowners (1960); and she was the wife of Gary Cooper for his last film, The Naked Edge (1961).
Few of Deborah Kerr's later films were as distinguished as some of the earlier ones, though she was well cast as governesses in The Innocents (1961) and The Chalk Garden (1964) and as a spinster poet in The Night of the Iguana (1964).
She also appeared in Casino Royale (1967) and The Arrangement (1970), and she brought great distinction to The Assam Garden (1985) as an Indian tea-planter's lonely widow settled, as a former memsahib, in Surrey.
On television in the 1980s Deborah Kerr played the older incarnation of Emma Harte, in an adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford's Woman of Substance, for which she was nominated for an Emmy.
In 1991 she received a Bafta Special Award; and in 1994 she was awarded an honorary Oscar in recognition of the "perfection, discipline and elegance" of her screen work.
She was appointed CBE in 1998.
In recent years she had been suffering from Parkinson's disease.
Deborah Kerr married first, in 1945 (dissolved 1959), Squadron Leader Anthony Bartley, DFC. She married secondly, in 1960, Peter Viertel, the author and screenwriter, who survives her with the two daughters of her first marriage. Her brother Edmund Trimmer, a retired journalist, was murdered in a road rage incident in Birmingham in 2004.
may she rest in peace.
your huge fan Avalon/Nessa
Deborah Kerr
Last Updated: 1:20pm BST 18/10/2007
Page 1 of 3
"An artist of impeccable grace and beauty "
Academy Award citation
Deborah Kerr, star of From Here To Eternity, died on Tuesday in Suffolk, England. She was 86.Her death was announced to The Associated Press by her agent, Anne Hutton. She had Parkinson’s disease.
Kerr was the unfadingly ladylike and prototypical English rose whose red-haired, angular beauty and self-possessed femininity distinguished more than 50 films in four decades of cinema.
Kerr: "prototypical English rose"
She made serenity dramatic; and though her poise might be ruffled at critical moments in scenes of passion (most famously exemplified by her encounter on the beach with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity in 1953), her well-bred airs and social graces made her a model of British womanhood in Hollywood.
Her best-known film was probably The King and I, in which she played a haughty governess opposite Yul Brynner's Siamese monarch; and her principal problem as an accomplished actress was to convince Hollywood of her sensual potential. Although she herself was a more spirited, relaxed and informal person than her image on the screen suggested, producers were reluctant to cast her in passionate roles.
Nevertheless, when they came her way - as they did after From Here to Eternity - her type of refined sensuality proved refreshingly attractive, since it hinted at hidden desires and forbidden feelings, giving her acting an extra edge and interest.
If she still looked more at ease on screen as a nun than as a nymphomaniac, or as a governess rather than a seductress, Deborah Kerr loved to hint at what she called "banked fires", the volcano steaming away beneath the ice cap. And though she used merrily to deny that in younger days she had tried to seduce one of her old co-stars, Stewart Granger, in the back of a London cab (as he asserted in his autobiography), it was the contrast between her very British gentility and her sexual vulnerability that often gave her screen persona its savour.
She was born Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer, the daughter of Captain Arthur Kerr-Trimmer, at Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire, on September 30 1921 and educated in Bristol, where she attended a drama school run by her aunt, Phyllis Smale.
Her 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 walking on in various Shakespeare productions at the Open-Air Theatre, Regent's Park, she joined the Oxford Playhouse repertory company in 1940, playing, inter alia, Margaret in Dear Brutus and Patty Moss in The Two Bouquets.
Her first film appearance was in Michael Powell's Contraband (1939), though her scenes were deleted from the final release; but with her next two British films - Major Barbara and Love on the Dole (both 1941) - her screen future seemed assured.
Her performance, said 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'."
After Hatter's Castle (1941) and The Day Will Dawn (1942) the "yapping" grew so loud that by the time Deborah Kerr reached the West End in a revival of Heartbreak House (Cambridge Theatre, 1943) the drama critics were ready to dismiss her as an impostor from the cinema.
In the event, she stole attention as Ellie Dunn from stalwarts such as Edith Evans and Isabel Jeans. She was only 21. "She has the rare gift," wrote the 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."
It was to be 29 years before Deborah Kerr returned to the London stage, and then in such unremarkable and occasional productions as an old-fashioned weepie, The Day After the Fair (Lyric, 1972), a Peter Ustinov comedy, Overheard (Haymarket, 1981) and a revival of Emlyn Williams's The Corn is Green.
On the pre-London tour of The Corn is Green she needed so much prompting on the first night in Bath (she had been laid low with a tummy bug) that she was booed. It was rather as if, wrote one critic, a bishop had been debagged in the Athenaeum. But when the show reached the Old Vic in 1985 she found a cautious welcome as the determined schoolmistress who brought enlightenment to the dark south Wales valleys at the turn of the century
Not that her theatrical record should be judged only by her handful of West End appearances. She liked touring. "I do it because it's exactly like dressing up for the grown-ups," she said. "I don't mean to belittle acting, but I'm like a child when I'm out there on a stage performing - shocking the grown-ups, enchanting them, making them laugh or cry. It's an unbelievable terror, a kind of masochistic madness. The older you get the easier it should be, but it isn't."
After her first London success she toured England and Scotland in Heartbreak House. Near the end of the Second World War she also toured Holland, France and Belgium for Ensa as Mrs Manningham in Angel Street, and Britain (with Stewart Granger) in Gaslight. And after her Broadway début, in 1953, as the schoolmaster's wife who seduces a pupil in Tea and Sympathy, she toured the United States. She also acted, in 1975, in two other American plays: Seascape (New York) and Souvenir (Los Angeles).
While Deborah Kerr's West End plays were few in number, she appeared in more than 50 films. Cast usually in sympathetic roles - as nice girls driven from home by overbearing fathers, or brave young things who defy the enemy - she was ever ladylike and socially assured, but with enough personality to hint at the human being beneath the elegant surface.
In her second film for Michael Powell, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), she appeared as three different women (identical in looks), each of whom seems the ideal woman to the film's hero, Clive Candy, VC (Roger Livesey), at different stages in his life. And as if to show her versatility and contradict assumptions about her nice English loyalties, she played an Irish colleen who spied for the Nazis against Britain in Frank Launder's I See a Dark Stranger (1946).
A nun in the same director's Black Narcissus (1947) was perhaps more in Deborah Kerr's line. At any rate, it brought an invitation from MGM to go to Hollywood, where her roles grew less interesting as the type-casting continued. She was a war widow in The Hucksters (1947); an ageing dipsomaniac in Edward My Son (1949); a decorative object in King Solomon's Mines (1950); a dull Christian in Quo Vadis (1951); and an even duller Princess Flavia in The Prisoner of Zenda (1952).
But as Portia in Joseph Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar (1953) Deborah Kerr showed her theatrical mettle, and later that year - in Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity - she showed a new side of her talent, as a captain's wife romping illicitly and passionately on a beach with Burt Lancaster as the tide came in. For this she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress - one of six such nominations she was to receive that were unsuccessful.
The film itself won eight Oscars (including for best picture) and the New York critics chose it as the best film of the year. At last her sensuality had been admitted; it would always be muted by Hollywood standards because of her temperament and personality, but its existence would enrich many future roles - for example, that of the repressed wife in The End of the Affair (1955), with Van Johnson.
Not much of it came through in The King and I (1956), when she played the regal British governess to Brynner's Siamese monarch. Later that year, as a Roman Catholic widow in The Proud and the Profane, she was seduced by William Holden; and in Tea and Sympathy (also 1956), as the wife of a neglectful housemaster, she in turn was the seducer, of one of her husband's pupils.
In Heaven Knows Mr Allison (1957), one of John Huston's best comedies, Deborah Kerr played a nun alone on a desert island who encounters Robert Mitchum as a leering marine; and she had another success, this time opposite Cary Grant, in An Affair to Remember (also 1957).
In Separate Tables (1958) she was a shy spinster who befriended David Niven's bogus major, despite that character's unusual sexual habits. And in Bonjour Tristesse (1958) she played the same actor's mistress whose nice nature was, for once, examined and found wanting.
Deborah Kerr was also the mistress of F Scott Fitzgerald (as played by Cary Grant) in Beloved Infidel (1959). In Prudence and the Pill (1968) she cuckolded her husband (David Niven), and as late as 1969 she was again Burt Lancaster's mistress, in The Gypsy Moths.
As the wife of a peer in The Grass is Greener she was caught philandering with Robert Mitchum; but the couple were happily married for The Sundowners (1960); and she was the wife of Gary Cooper for his last film, The Naked Edge (1961).
Few of Deborah Kerr's later films were as distinguished as some of the earlier ones, though she was well cast as governesses in The Innocents (1961) and The Chalk Garden (1964) and as a spinster poet in The Night of the Iguana (1964).
She also appeared in Casino Royale (1967) and The Arrangement (1970), and she brought great distinction to The Assam Garden (1985) as an Indian tea-planter's lonely widow settled, as a former memsahib, in Surrey.
On television in the 1980s Deborah Kerr played the older incarnation of Emma Harte, in an adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford's Woman of Substance, for which she was nominated for an Emmy.
In 1991 she received a Bafta Special Award; and in 1994 she was awarded an honorary Oscar in recognition of the "perfection, discipline and elegance" of her screen work.
She was appointed CBE in 1998.
In recent years she had been suffering from Parkinson's disease.
Deborah Kerr married first, in 1945 (dissolved 1959), Squadron Leader Anthony Bartley, DFC. She married secondly, in 1960, Peter Viertel, the author and screenwriter, who survives her with the two daughters of her first marriage. Her brother Edmund Trimmer, a retired journalist, was murdered in a road rage incident in Birmingham in 2004.
