Britain:Deborah Kerr, the Scottish-born Hollywood actor who melted the heart of Yul Brynner in The King and I, all but broke that of Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember, and positively singed the screen with her passionate kiss in the surf with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity, has died in England at the age of 86.
She had been suffering from Parkinson's disease for some years.
Her passing is another broken link with Hollywood's golden age - an age which appreciated the elegance and style of British performers who could modify their stage training for a relaxed intimacy with the camera.
She was the joint holder of the record for the most unrewarded Best Actress Oscar nominations: six. There was incidentally never any uncertainty in the US about how her surname should be pronounced. The 1940s MGM campaign slogan was: "Deborah Kerr. It rhymes with star."
Her long career showed her to be capable of sensuality but, perhaps more prominently, intelligence and refinement of feeling, a beautifully calibrated responsiveness to the emotions being generated everywhere in the movie of which she was a part. But passion always bubbled under the cool exterior.
After training as a ballet dancer she switched to acting and had a breakthrough in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1943 film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a brilliant and sceptical war movie which enraged Winston Churchill.
Her breakthrough came in another Powell movie, Black Narcissus, in 1947, as the nun who finds herself secretly excited and disturbed by earthly passions during a mission to the Himalayas.
Hollywood followed and her promotion to legend status reputedly came when Joan Crawford declared herself uninterested in the role of Karen Holmes, the unfaithful army wife in a movie version of James Jones's novel From Here to Eternity.
Kerr got the job instead, and she had the famous affair with Lancaster's rugged Sgt Milt Warden, kissing him passionately as the waves rolled over them. Modern critics wonder if Kerr's British poise was appropriate for this earthy role: yet it was precisely the thawing of this poise which made the scene so raunchy.
Later, she wrung the tears of audiences in An Affair to Rememberand entranced family audiences with her correct yet twinkly schoolmistress in The King and I.
Deborah Kerr was what the movie world professes to admire but perhaps too rarely promotes: a class act.
- (Guardian service)