Deborah Kerr(1921–2007)

Deborah Jane Trimmer was born at 1 Pittville Road in the Hillhead district of Glasgow on the thirtieth of September 1921, only daughter of Captain Arthur Trimmer of the Royal Navy and Kathleen Smale Kerr. The family moved to Helensburgh on the Firth of Clyde when she was small, where her father died when she was fourteen, and her mother moved her to Weston-super-Mare in Somerset where she was schooled at Rossholme School. She trained as a dancer at the Sadler's Wells Ballet School in London from 1937 in her sixteenth year, took her stage name from the Scottish maternal line, and made her first stage appearance in the corps de ballet of the Sadler's Wells production of Prometheus at the Aldwych Theatre in October 1938.

She moved into film work in 1940 in her nineteenth year, played the leading roles in Major Barbara (1941) and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) for the Powell and Pressburger Archers production company, and in Black Narcissus (1947, the Powell and Pressburger Himalayan-convent classic) gave the performance as Sister Clodagh that brought her to Hollywood. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed her on a seven-year contract in 1947; she took the leading role in The Hucksters opposite Clark Gable (1947), Edward, My Son opposite Spencer Tracy (1949, her first Oscar nomination) and Quo Vadis (1951).

Her central years were 1953 to 1960. From Here to Eternity (1953, the Fred Zinnemann adaptation of the James Jones novel set at Pearl Harbor in November 1941) cast her as Karen Holmes opposite Burt Lancaster, the role and the beach-kiss scene that fixed her into the central iconography of American post-war cinema; she received her second Oscar nomination and the New York Film Critics' Circle Award for Best Actress. The King and I (1956, the Walter Lang adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, with her singing dubbed by Marni Nixon) cast her as Anna Leonowens opposite Yul Brynner; the film took the Academy Award for Best Picture and Kerr received her third Oscar nomination. Tea and Sympathy (1956, with John Kerr no relation) brought her a fourth nomination; An Affair to Remember (1957, opposite Cary Grant in the Leo McCarey remake of Love Affair) gave her the most-imitated single line-reading of her career. Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) brought her fifth Oscar nomination and Separate Tables (1958) her sixth, the six nominations across nine years without a competitive win being the standing record for any film actress at the time.

She continued the Hollywood career through The Sundowners (1960, the Fred Zinnemann Australian outback drama opposite Robert Mitchum), The Innocents (1961, the Jack Clayton adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, the performance she said in her later interviews she was most proud of), The Night of the Iguana (1964, the John Huston adaptation of Tennessee Williams) and Bonjour Tristesse (1958). She married the screenwriter Peter Viertel in 1960 and retired from film work in the late 1960s to live at Klosters in Switzerland and at Marbella in Spain. She was awarded the Honorary Academy Award in March 1994 for her impeccable grace and beauty, a discipline and dedication to her craft that has earned her the respect of fellow actresses and the admiration of millions of viewers, and she was made a CBE in the New Year Honours of 1998. She died at Botesdale in Suffolk on the sixteenth of October 2007 in her eighty-seventh year. The Kerr name in modern English-language cinema carries the weight of the six Academy Award nominations of 1953 to 1961.