Deborah Kerr: Deborah Kerr, who has died of Parkinson's disease aged 86, was an innately graceful and consummately professional actor.
She worked steadily, averaging one film a year, with directors of stature, often opposite chums such as David Niven, Robert Mitchum and Cary Grant. The result was a career that sailed on rather majestically, only occasionally hitting a squall or rough passage.
She achieved fame when barely 20, in a star-laden version of Major Barbara(1941), and for 45 years remained at or near the pinnacle of her profession. Within a period of 12 years, she received six Oscar nominations but did not receive the statuette until 1994, when an honorary Academy award was given for her lifetime's work.
By the late 1980s, in poor health, she had effectively retired from acting, gravitating from her home in Switzerland to Spain with her second husband, the writer Peter Viertel (whose screen credits include The African Queen). Much later, she returned to England.
Kerr was born in Helensburgh, Scotland. She was educated at Northumberland House in Bristol. She moved to London to study at the Sadler's Wells ballet school, making her debut in Prometheus in 1939.
That year saw her in a small role in Much Ado About Nothingat the Regent's Park open air theatre, and from 1939 to 1940 she worked with the Oxford Repertory. An abortive screen debut in Contraband(1940) ended on the editing-room floor, but the directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were soon to remedy that unkind cut.
Kerr's break came when the ebullient Gabriel Pascal, who had the confidence of George Bernard Shaw, cast her in Major Barbara, in which she gave a touching performance as Jenny Hill. Under contract to Pascal, she was given the lead in 1941 in Love on the Doleand rapidly followed this excellent movie with Penn of Pennsylvaniaand then a plum role as Robert Newton's downtrodden daughter in the melodramatic Hatter's Castle. There she met her first husband, fighter pilot Tony Bartley.
In a piece of casting that Martin Scorsese has justly described as audacious, Powell and Pressburger gave the then 21-year-old the triple roles of driver, governess and wife/ nurse, the women who appear throughout Blimp's story in their monumental The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp(1943).
Kerr's film career paused as she toured and then went into the West End in Heartbreak House. She also worked for the forces' entertainment organisation Ensa throughout Europe, and again met Bartley. They married in 1945.
That year she returned to the screen, opposite Robert Donat in Perfect Strangers, followed by I See a Dark Stranger(1946) as an Irish girl who, through hatred of the English, spies for the Germans.
In 1947, Kerr was reunited with Powell and Pressburger for a heady masterwork, Black Narcissus. She played the pivotal role of Sister Clodagh, an insecure nun in charge of a Catholic missionary school (Pinewood stood in - remarkably - for the Himalayas). This remains a benchmark in her career.
Pascal meanwhile had sold her contract to MGM and Kerr found herself in The Hucksters(1947), opposite Clark Gable and Ava Gardner. This was soon followed by If Winter Comes(1947). She was directed by one of the studio's top names, George Cukor, in a stodgy version of Robert Morley's stage success, Edward My Son(1948), with Spencer Tracy.
Costume soon became the order of the day in such movies as King Solomon's Mines(1950), Quo Vadis(1951) and The Prisoner of Zenda(1952). She had the small role of Portia in Julius Caesar. The MGM period ended dismally with Young Bess(1953).
She extricated herself from the MGM straitjacket and landed the controversial role opposite Burt Lancaster in Fred Zinneman's From Here to Eternity(1953). Cast against type, she was formidable as the sexually rapacious officer's wife who has an affair with an NCO, played by Lancaster, at the time of Pearl Harbour in 1941.
Graham Greene's The End of the Affair(1954) brought her back to England.
In 1956 she had her biggest popular success in a lacklustre version of The King and Iwith Yul Brynner. Kerr sang, danced and acted herself into a third Oscar nomination and a box-office smash. In 1957 she was reunited with Cary Grant in the romantic drama An Affair to Rememberand donned her nun's habit again in the popular Heaven Knows, Mr Allisonfor a favourite director, John Huston.
There were better parts and higher salaries than in the MGM days and Kerr moved on to Bonjour Tristesse(1957) and another spinster role in the botched version of Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables(1958). Three duff movies followed before, in 1960, Zinnemann gave her a wonderfully rich part opposite Robert Mitchum in The Sundowners.
Kerr joined Mitchum and Grant again in a conventional reworking of the stage hit, The Grass is Greener(1960), followed by a less happy experience. At best The Naked Edge(1961) was a routine thriller, made painful by Gary Cooper, already ill with cancer, in his last role and in the last year of his life.
The same year when she again played a governess, this time in Jack Clayton's version of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Transformed into The Innocents, it showed that Kerr was as good as the material allowed and often better. Her role as the haunted and taunted governess gave perfect rein to her upright demeanour and hidden depths.
After a dull version of The Chalk Garden(1963), she was rescued by John Huston and cast as the poet spinster in the steamy The Night of the Iguana(1964). She sank without trace in Marriage on the Rocks(1965) and then made a trio of films opposite Niven in 1966, 1967 and 1968.
Two big movies in 1969 offered Kerr dull parts - with Burt Lancaster in the sky drama The Gypsy Mothsand Kirk Douglas in The Arrangement, but the films, one lugubrious, the second overwrought, were not to her taste and she effectively retired from Hollywood. Some made-for-television films kept her occupied. Her farewell to the big screen came in The Assam Garden(1985).
Her marriage to Tony Bartley ended in divorce in 1959. He died in 2001. She married Viertel in 1960. He survives her, as do two daughters from her first marriage and three grandsons.
Deborah Kerr (Deborah Kerr Viertel), born September 30th, 1921; died October 16th, 2007.