Deborah Kerr, 1921 - 2007.

British actress Deborah Kerr, who shared one of cinema's most famous kisses with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity, has died, her agent said Thursday. She was 86.

The AP.

Nominated six times for an Oscar, Kerr never won the best actress award despite starring in several memorable roles, opposite the likes of Robert Mitchum and Cary Grant.... While the gold statue may have eluded her, she was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1993 in recognition of the "perfection, discipline and elegance" of her screen work.... Her "breakthrough" role came in Black Narcissus in 1947, and, shortly afterwards, she was well on her way to Hollywood.

Mark Tran in the Guardian.

Updated through 10/19.

If she still looked more at ease on screen as a nun than as a nymphomaniac, or as a governess rather than a seductress, Deborah Kerr loved to hint at what she called "banked fires," the volcano steaming away beneath the ice cap. And though she used merrily to deny that in younger days she had tried to seduce one of her old co-stars, Stewart Granger, in the back of a London cab (as he asserted in his autobiography), it was the contrast between her very British gentility and her sexual vulnerability that often gave her screen persona its savour.

The Telegraph.

See also: screenonline, Wikipedia, Classic Movies, Phillip Oliver, Reel Classics.

Updates: "Throughout her career, Miss Kerr worked at being unpredictable," writes Richard Severo in the New York Times. "She was believable as a steadfast nun in Black Narcissus; as the love-hungry wife of an empty-headed army captain stationed at Pearl Harbor in From Here to Eternity; as a headmaster's spouse who sleeps with an 18-year-old student to prove to him that he is a man in Tea and Sympathy; as a spunky schoolmarm not afraid to joust and dance with the King of Siam in The King and I; as a Salvation Army lass in Major Barbara; and even as Portia, the Roman matron married to Brutus, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. She could be virginal, ethereal, gossamer and fragile, or earthy, spicy and suggestive, and sometimes she managed to display all her skills at the same time."

"For me though, her finest work came in films for which she wasn't nominated, such as her triple role in Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," writes Edward Copeland. "Often, she was the best thing in otherwise lackluster films such as Otto Preminger's Bonjour tristesse and John Huston's adaptation of Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana."

The Siren has a lovely quote from Michael Powell.

"An actress of great distinction, and one who was perhaps undervalued in her time," writes Robert Cashill.

JJ posts clips, including one for Wiley, from The Innocents.

"I had planned on writing about The Innocents in the coming days because frankly, there is no film that I find more chilling or haunting then that film made by Jack Clayton in 1961, which starred the lovely Deborah Kerr," writes Kimberly Lindbergs. "The Innocents is the first movie that comes to my mind when I think of 'films that give me the willies' and that's saying a lot, since I've literally watched thousands of horror films throughout the course of my life at this point. Due to Deborah's passing, I figured I'd write a little bit about my favorite horror film today...."

"She could make dross and mediocrity worth watching, recognized quality in the making, and held the lens with ease," writes Flickhead.

Updates, 10/19: The NYT adds links to its reviews of films starring Deborah Kerr, a slide show and a remembrance by Douglas Martin: "It is likely that her role in The King and I, as Anna in her famous hoop skirt, tops many people's list of favorite Kerr characters. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 1986, Miss Kerr suggested it might not have been hers. 'I'd rather drop dead in my tracks one day than end up in a wheelchair in some nursing home watching interminable replays of The King and I,' she said before hooting with laughter."

In the Guardian:

• Brian Baxter looks back on "a long career that sailed on rather majestically like an elegant ocean liner, only occasionally hitting a squall or rough passage. There was little to interest gossip columnists or to shock the public and, at least on the surface she seemed rather serene in the midst of such a frantic profession."

• Ronald Bergan finds her to be "perhaps one of the most unlikely and most subtle of sex symbols in the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s."

• Deborah Kerr was what the movie world professes to admire but perhaps too rarely promotes: a class act," writes Peter Bradshaw.

• And a gallery.

"[I]nspired by the House Next Door's ongoing Close-Up Blogathon, I thought I'd share some screen captures from the first of her three roles in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in which the 24-year-old Deborah Kerr gives the best performance in what I really think might be the most perfect and most agreeable film ever made," writes Bob Westal.

Posted by dwhudson at October 18, 2007 8:39 AM