Deborah Kerr Biography

Deborah Kerr Deborah Kerr is an acclaimed actress, dancer, and singer who was one of the biggest stars of the mid-twentieth century. She remains popular for her performance as Anna in The King and I.Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer was born on September 30, 1921, in Helensburgh, Scotland. Her father, a civil engineer, died when she was just fifteen. She had one brother, Teddy, whom she used to dress up and involve in amateur theatrical productions for her family. At school, Kerr loved painting, dancing, singing, and playing the piano, and she went on to Hicks-Smale Drama School to study acting, ballet, and singing. This led to appearances in Shakespeare plays in the Open Air Theatre in London's Regent's Park, where she was discovered by film director Robert Atkins.Kerr's first film role would have been in the Michael Powell thriller Contraband, but her scenes were cut from the final version. Instead, she broke into film acting in a hugely successful adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara, also starring Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison. This was followed by a leading role opposite Clifford Evans in Love on the Dole, and then by a complex performance as three different women in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, with James McKechnie and Neville Mapp, which won her critical acclaim and the offer of a contract with MGM studios. She then won a New York Film Critics' award for her work in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus, alongside Flora Robson and Jean Simmons, after which success was assured. Kerr went on to star in nearly fifty films, among them such classics as King Solomon's Mines; Quo Vadis; An Affair to Remember, with Cary Grant, Bonjour Tristesse, with David Niven and Jean Seberg; and The Night of the Iguana , with Richard Burton and Ava Gardner. Kerr specialized in playing upper-class English ladies - cool and restrained. She was perhaps most famous for her performance as Anna, opposite Yul Brynner, in The King and I.Despite the success of her film career, Kerr never gave up her stage work, appearing on Broadway for the first time in 1953 in Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, in a role that she later to reprised for cinema. She won a Sarah Siddons award for her performance in Chicago! and she also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. However, despite being nominated six times, she never managed to pick up a Best Actress Oscar. Kerr was eventually given an honorary Lifetime Achievement Oscar for perfection, discipline and elegance throughout her long career. She has also been made a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.Kerr has been married twice, first to Squadron Leader Anthony Bartley, who went on to become a successful television actor and with whom she had two children, Melanie Jane and Francesca Ann, the latter of whom went on to marry actor John Shrapnel, who starred in Notting Hill with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. Some years after they divorced, she married writer Peter Viertel, who wrote Clint Eastwood's White Hunter, Black Heart. The couple made their home in Switzerland but have since moved to England to be closer to Kerr's children. Kerr now suffers from Parkinson's disease and has retired from film-making.