Oscar Profile #5: Deborah Kerr

Today would have been Deborah Kerr’s 89th birthday.

The ballet-trained dancer-turned-actress, made her screen debut in a supporting role in 1941’s Major Barbara, causing such a sensation that she was immediately cast in leading roles in major British films. With the dual success of Black Narcissus and I See a Dark Stranger (aka The Adventuress) in 1947, it was inevitable that she would be brought to Hollywood where her first starring role was opposite Clark Gable in The Hucksters.

Hollywood directors continued to cast her in high profile lady-like roles until Fred Zinnemann cast her against type as the colonel’s nymphomaniac wife in From Here to Eternity, a role intended for Joan Crawford. Thereafter she alternated women of unimpeachable purity (Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, An Affair to Remember, Separate Tables, The Sundowners) with those who seemed to possess a great deal of fire beneath the ice (The King and I, Tea and Sympathy, The Innocents, The Night of the Iguana).

By 1960 she had been nominated six times for an Oscar without winning, a record that has since been tied and broken several times. Peter O’Toole with eight nominations and no wins currently holds the record.

A series of less than stellar films in the late 1960s hastened the end of her once brilliant career. In later years she appeared occasionally on TV, most notably in Elsa Lanchester’s role in the 1982 remake of The Witness for the Prosecution opposite Ralph Richardson, and the 1984 miniseries, A Woman of Substance in which she played the older version of Jenny Seagrove’s title character, a kitchen maid who rises to head of a corporate empire.

Deborah Kerr was finally awarded a career achievement Oscar in 1994. She died in 2007 two weeks after her 86th birthday.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

BLACK NARCISSUS (1947), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Still considered the most beautifully photographed film ever made in a studio, the background matte painting of the Himalayas is so breathtakingly real that anyone seeing the film without knowing its background would swear it was shot on location.

The entire film is brilliant from start to finish, but it’s Kerr’s portrayal of Sister Clodagh, the conflicted Anglican nun, that grabs your attention and refuses to let go.

Kerr won the new York Film Critics Award jointly for this performance and the one in the same year’s I See a Dark Stranger (aka The Adventuress) in which she is almost as good. David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Flora Robson, Sabu and Jean Simmons also stand out.

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953), directed by Fred Zinnemann

James Jones’ blistering best-seller about the days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was toned down considerably to conform to the guidelines within the Hollywood Production Code. Donna Reed’s prostitute became a dance hall hostess, and bully Jack Warden’s latent homosexuality was completely eliminated, as was the risque language typical of real soldiers. What remains, however, is still quite strong, from the performances of Burt Lancaster as the sympathetic sergeant, Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra as the bullied privates, to Deborah Kerr as the nymphomaniac wife of the shady Colonel. Kerr’s role is borderline supporting, but she makes every moment count, especially that famous roll in the sand with Lancaster and that final moment aboard the departing ship with Donna Reed.

Kerr played similar roles in the next couple of years in The End of the Affair opposite Van Johnson and The Proud and Profane opposite William Holden.

TEA AND SYMPATHY (1956), directed by Vincente Minnelli

Reprising her Broadway triumph as the housemaster’s wife in Tea and Sympathy, Kerr was at her most radiant. Although her Oscar nomination that year was for her splendid Mrs. Anna in The King and I, this is one she should have been nominated for.

Kerr is heartbreaking as the woman who must stand by and watch as her husband (Leif Erickson) and the boarding school students mercilessly tease sensitive boarder John Kerr (no relation), finally taking it upon herself to offer him more than a little tea and sympathy.

Under threat of condemnation by the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency, the filmmakers added a coda to the end of the film in which the younger Kerr returns to the school and learns that the older Kerr suffered for her “wrong” in seducing him. Audiences of the day, however, were able to see through the nonsense and think of the film as having ended with the elder Kerr’s dropping of her shoulder strap and saying to the younger Kerr, “when you talk about this…and you will…be kind.”

AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER (1957), directed by Leo McCarey

For the second year in a row Kerr was nominated for an Oscar for the wrong film.

As good as she was as the nun in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison opposite Robert Mitchum, she was even better as the nightclub singer who has a shipboard romance with Cary Grant in Leo McCarey’s remake of his own Love Affair.

McCarey’s remake has both more humor and more pathos. Of all the actresses who remade Irene Dunne originals, none was superior to Dunne except maybe Kerr in both this and the prior year’s The King and I.

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964), directed by John Huston

The late 1950s and early 1960s were good to Kerr in films such as Separate Tables, The Sundowners, The Innocents and The Chalk Garden. Her role in John Huston’s film of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana was her first since 1941’s Major Barbara in which she was not the female lead. She was, however, still a big enough star to command equal billing with Richard Burton and Ava Gardner who had ironically been a supporting player in The Hucksters.

Kerr plays a spinster who is at the end of her rope after the death of her poetry spewing grandfather, played by Cyril Delevanti. She has the film’s most famous line in a scene where Burton’s defrocked preacher is revolted by her confession of sharing her panties with a pervert: “Nothing human disgusts me, Mr. Shannon, unless it is unkind, violent.”