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Deborah Kerr

Birth Name: Deborah Kerr
Birth date: 30 September 1921
Country: UK

Deborah Kerr was born on 30 September 1921 in Helensburgh, near Glasgow, Scotland and died on 16 October 2007. She was a Golden Globe Award-winning Scottish actress who also received honorary Academy and BAFTA awards.

Kerr was nominated for a best actress Oscar six times, including for her performances as the correct widow in The King and I (1956) with Yul Brynner and as the unhappy officer's wife in the wartime From Here to Eternity (1953).  She also starred with Cary Grant in 1957's An Affair To Remember.

It was her passionate kiss with Burt Lancaster as waves crashed over them on a Hawaiian beach in From Here to Eternity that many will remember her best.  Kerr’s roles as forceful, sometimes frustrated women pushed the boundaries of 1950s Hollywood.

She was born Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer on September 30, 1921, in Helensburgh, Scotland, UK.  She trained as a dancer, but took up acting and made her film debut in Contraband (1940).

Successes in British films The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and Black Narcissus (1947) brought her a Hollywood contract. Invariably cast in well-bred, lady-like roles, she played numerous governesses and nuns.  All that changed with 1953’s From Here to Eternity.

Kerr retired from the screen in 1969, returning to the theatre in the 1970s, and to the cinema in The Assam Garden (1985). She received a BAFTA special award in 1991.

In 1994, Kerr finally got an Oscar, receiving an honorary Academy Award for her distinguished career as an "artist of impeccable grace and beauty, a dedicated actress whose motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and elegance."

Kerr married to Anthony Charles Bartley, a squadron leader in the Royal Air Force, in 1946.  They had two daughters and were divorced in 1959. A year later, she married novelist-screenwriter Peter Viertel.

Credits by Biography.Com