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Letter to the editor

She changed women's roles, and her kiss lives in legend

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published October 19, 2007

LONDON - 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.

Ms. Kerr, 86, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, died Tuesday (Oct. 16, 2007) 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.

Ms. 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 her 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."

Ms. Kerr, who appeared in nearly 50 films, usually was genteel and quietly forceful opposite rugged male performers such as Lancaster and Robert Mitchum. Her biographer, Eric Braun, wrote that she excelled in parts that conveyed "moral fortitude concealed by a frail appearance."

She was three times a graceful female counterpart to the suave Cary Grant, including in An Affair to Remember, regarded by many critics and movie enthusiasts as the best of the three filmed versions about star-crossed shipboard lovers.

Born in Helensburgh, Scotland, Ms. Kerr (pronounced CARR) moved with her parents to England when she was 5, and she studied dance in the Bristol school of her aunt, Phyllis Smale. At 17 she made her stage debut as a member of the corps de ballet in Prometheus, but she soon switched to drama.

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.

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

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. She also voiced disdain for the public appetite for gratuitous nudity onscreen. She returned to the stage, in Seascape and Long Day's Journey Into Night.

In 1946 she married Anthony Charles Bartley. They had two daughters and were divorced in 1959. A year later she married Peter Viertel, a novelist-screenwriter.

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

Information from the Los Angeles Times was used in this report.

Best-actress nominations

Edward, My Son (1949)

From Here to Eternity (1953)

The King and I (1956)

Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957)

Separate Tables (1958)

The Sundowners (1960)

Other notable movies

An Affair to Remember, The Sundowners, Beloved Infidel, The Innocents, The Night of the Iguana and The Arrangement.

[Last modified October 19, 2007, 01:02:53]