[Deathwatch] Deborah Kerr, actress, 86

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

'From Here to Eternity' actress Kerr dies

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Movies/10/18/obit.kerr.ap/index.html

LONDON, England (AP) -- Deborah Kerr, who shared one of Hollywood's
most famous kisses and made her mark with such roles as the correct
widow in "The King and I" and the unhappy officer's wife in "From Here
to Eternity," has died. She was 86.

 Kerr, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, died Tuesday in Suffolk
in eastern England, her agent, Anne Hutton, said Thursday.

For many she will be remembered best for her kiss with Burt Lancaster
as waves crashed over them on a Hawaiian beach in the wartime drama
"From Here to Eternity."

Kerr's roles as forceful, sometimes frustrated women pushed the limits
of Hollywood's treatment of sex on the screen during the censor-bound
1950s.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Kerr a six
times for best actress, but never gave her an Academy Award until it
presented an honorary Oscar in 1994 for her distinguished career as an
"artist of impeccable grace and beauty, a dedicated actress whose
motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and
elegance."

She had the reputation of a "no problem" actress.

"I have never had a fight with any director, good or bad," she said
toward the end of her career. "There is a way around everything if you
are smart enough."

Kerr (pronounced CARR) was the only daughter of Arthur Kerr-Trimmer, a
civil engineer and architect who died when she was 14.

Born in Helensburgh, Scotland, she moved with her parents to England
when she was 5, and she started to study dance in the Bristol school of
her aunt, Phyllis Smale.

Kerr won a scholarship to continue studying at the Sadler's Wells
Ballet School in London. A 17 she made her stage debut as a member of
the corps de ballet in "Prometheus."

She soon switched to drama, however, and began playing small parts in
repertory theater in London until it was shut down by the 1939 outbreak
of World War II.

After reading children's stories on British Broadcasting Corp. radio,
she was given the part of a hatcheck girl with two lines in the film
"Contraband," but her speaking role ended on the cutting-room floor.

After more repertory acting she had another crack at films, reprising
her stage role of Jenny, a Salvation Army worker, in a 1940 adaptation
of George Bernard Shaw's "Major Barbara," and receiving favorable
reviews both in Britain and the United States.

She continued making films in Britain during the war, including one --
"Colonel Blimp" -- in which she played three different women over a
span of decades.

"It is astonishing how she manages to make the three parts distinctly
separate as characterizations," said New Movies magazine at the time.

Kerr was well-reviewed as an Irish spy in "The Adventuress" and as the
tragic girlfriend of a Welsh miner in "Love on the Dole."

She was invited to Hollywood in 1946 to play in "The Hucksters"
opposite Clark Gable. She went on to work with virtually all the other
top American actors and with many top directors, including John Huston,
Otto Preminger and Elia Kazan.

Tired of being typecast in serene, ladylike roles, she rebelled to win
a release from her MGM contract and get the role of Karen Holmes in
"From Here to Eternity."

Playing the Army officer's alcoholic, sex-starved wife in a fling with
Lancaster as a sergeant opened up new possibilities for Kerr.

She played virtually every part imaginable from murderer to princess to
a Roman Christian slave to a nun.

In "The King and I," with her singing voice dubbed by Marni Nixon, she
was Anna Leonowens, who takes her son to Siam so that she can teach the
children of the king, played by Yul Brynner.

Her best-actress nominations were for "Edward, My Son" (1949), "From
Here to Eternity" (1953), "The King and I" (1956), "Heaven Knows, Mr.
Allison" (1957), "Separate Tables" (1958), and "The Sundowners" (1960).


Among her other movies is "An Affair to Remember" with Cary Grant.

Other notable roles were in "Beloved Infidel," "The Innocents" (an
adaptation of the Henry James novella "Turn of the Screw"), "The Night
of the Iguana" with Richard Burton and "The Arrangement" with Kirk
Douglas.

After "The Arrangement" in 1968, she took what she called a "leave of
absence" from acting, saying she felt she was "either too young or too
old" for any role she was offered.

Kerr told The Associated Press that she turned down a number of
scripts, either for being too explicit or because of excessive
violence.

She refused to play a nude scene in "The Gypsy Moths," released in
1968. "It was when they started that 'Now everybody has got to take
their clothes off,' " she said. "My argument was that it was completely
gratuitous. Had it been necessary for the dramatic content, I would
have done it."

In fact she undressed for "The Arrangement," even though the scene was
later cut. "There the nude scene was necessary, husband and wife in bed
together," Kerr said. "That was real."

She returned to the stage, acting in Edward Albee's "Seascape" on
Broadway and "Long Day's Journey Into Night" in Los Angeles.

Her Broadway debut was in 1953, when she was acclaimed as Laura
Reynolds, a teacher's wife who treats a sensitive student
compassionately in "Tea and Sympathy."

After a full season in New York, she took it on a national tour and
recreated the role in a movie in 1956.

Kerr was active until the mid-1980s, with "The Assam Garden," "Hold the
Dream" and "Reunion at Fairborough" all in 1985.

She told the AP that TV reruns of her old movies have "kept me alive"
for a new generation of film fans.

In 1945 Kerr married Anthony Charles Bartley, whom she had met as a
squadron leader in the Royal Air Force. They had two daughters and were
divorced in 1959. A year later she married Peter Viertel, a
novelist-screenwriter, with whom she lived on a large estate with two
trout ponds in the Swiss Alpine resort of Klosters and in a villa in
Marbella, Spain.

Kerr is survived by Viertel, two daughters and three grandchildren.

Many thanks to TheLenGuy for posting this obituary