page_title: Deborah Kerr
section_title: Film career
hierarchical_section_title: Deborah Kerr / Career / Film career
caption_attribution_description: Screenshot of Deborah Kerr from the trailer for the film The Sundowners
context_page_description: Deborah Jane Trimmer CBE, known professionally as Deborah Kerr, was a Scottish film, theatre and television actress. Kerr was nominated six times for the Academy Award for Best Actress, and holds the record for an actress most nominated in the lead actress category without winning.
  During her international film career, she won a Golden Globe Award for her performance as Anna Leonowens in the musical film The King and I. As well as The King and I, her films include: An Affair to Remember, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, From Here to Eternity, Tea and Sympathy, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, Separate Tables, The Innocents, The Sundowners, The Grass is Greener, and The Night of the Iguana.
  In 1994, however, having already received honorary awards from the Cannes Film Festival and BAFTA, Kerr received an Academy Honorary Award with a citation recognising her as "an artist of impeccable grace and beauty, a dedicated actress whose motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and elegance".
context_section_description: Kerr's first film role was in the British production Contraband in 1940, aged 18 or 19, but her scenes were edited out. With her next two British films — Major Barbara and Love on the Dole (both 1941) — her screen future seemed assured and her performance, said James Agate of Love on the Dole, "is not within a mile of Wendy Hiller's in the theatre, but it is a charming piece of work by a very pretty and promising beginner, so pretty and so promising that there is the usual yapping about a new star". 
  She went on to make Hatter's Castle (1942), in which she starred opposite Robert Newton and James Mason, and then played a Norwegian resistance fighter in The Day Will Dawn (1942). She was an immediate hit with the public: An American film trade paper reported in 1942 that she was the most popular British actress with Americans.
  In 1943, Kerr played three women in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. During the filming, according to Powell's autobiography, Powell and she became lovers:  "I realised that Deborah was both the ideal and the flesh-and-blood woman whom I had been searching for". Kerr made clear that her surname should be pronounced the same as "car". To avoid confusion over pronunciation, Louis B. Mayer of MGM billed her as "Kerr rhymes with Star!"
  Although the British Army refused to co-operate with the producers— and Winston Churchill thought the film would ruin wartime morale — Colonel Blimp confounded critics when it proved to be an artistic and commercial success. Powell hoped to reunite Kerr and lead actor Roger Livesey in his next film, A Canterbury Tale (1944), but her agent had sold her contract to MGM. According to Powell, his affair with Kerr ended when she made it clear to him that she would accept an offer to go to Hollywood if one were made.
  Her role as a troubled nun in the Powell and Pressburger production of Black Narcissus in 1947 did indeed bring her to the attention of Hollywood producers. The film was a hit in the US, as well as the UK, and Kerr won the New York Film Critics' Award as Actress of the Year. British exhibitors voted her the eighth-most popular local star at the box office. Soon she received the first of her Oscar nominations for Edward, My Son, a 1949 drama set in England that co-starred Spencer Tracy.
  In Hollywood, Kerr's British accent and manner led to a succession of roles portraying refined, reserved, and "proper" English ladies. Kerr, nevertheless, used any opportunity to discard her cool exterior. She starred in the 1950 adventure film King Solomon's Mines, shot on location in Africa with Stewart Granger and Richard Carlson. This was immediately followed by her appearance in the religious epic Quo Vadis (1951), shot at Cinecittà in Rome, in which she played the indomitable Lygia, a first-century Christian. She then played Princess Flavia in a remake of The Prisoner of Zenda (1952). 
  In 1953, Kerr "showed her theatrical mettle" as Portia in Joseph Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar. She then departed from typecasting with a performance that brought out her sensuality, as "Karen Holmes", the embittered military wife in Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity (1953), for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. The American Film Institute acknowledged the iconic status of the scene from that film in which Burt Lancaster and she romped illicitly and passionately amidst crashing waves on a Hawaiian beach. The organisation ranked it 20th in its list of the 100 most romantic films of all time.
  Thereafter, Kerr's career choices would make her known in Hollywood for her versatility as an actress.  She played the repressed wife in The End of the Affair (1955), with Van Johnson; a nun in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) opposite her long-time friend Robert Mitchum; a mama's girl in Separate Tables (1958) opposite David Niven; and a governess in both The Chalk Garden (1964) and The Innocents (1961) where she plays a governess tormented by apparitions. She also portrayed an earthy Australian sheep-herder's wife in The Sundowners (1960) an
caption: Deborah Kerr in The Sundowners (1960)
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