Deborah Jane Trimmer CBE, known professionally as Deborah Kerr, was a British actress.
54 Facts About Deborah Kerr
2.
Deborah Kerr was nominated six times for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
3.
In 1994, having already received honorary awards from the Cannes Film Festival and BAFTA, Deborah Kerr received an Academy Honorary Award with a citation recognizing her as "an artist of impeccable grace and beauty, a dedicated actress whose motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and elegance".
4.
Deborah Kerr Jane Trimmer was born on 30 September 1921 in Hillhead, Glasgow, the only daughter of Kathleen Rose and Capt.
5.
Young Deborah Kerr spent the first three years of her life in the west coast town of Helensburgh, where her parents lived with Deborah Kerr's grandparents in a house on West King Street.
6.
Deborah Kerr had a younger brother, Edmund, who became a journalist.
7.
Deborah Kerr died, aged 78, in a road rage incident in 2004.
8.
Deborah Kerr was educated at the independent Northumberland House School, Henleaze in Bristol, and at Rossholme School, Weston-super-Mare.
9.
Deborah Kerr originally trained as a ballet dancer, first appearing on stage at Sadler's Wells in 1938.
10.
Deborah Kerr's first acting teacher was her aunt, Phyllis Smale, who worked at a drama school in Bristol run by Lally Cuthbert Hicks.
11.
Deborah Kerr adopted the name Deborah Kerr on becoming a film actress.
12.
Deborah Kerr then went to the Sadler's Wells ballet school and in 1938 made her debut in the corps de ballet in Prometheus.
13.
Deborah Kerr had a strong support role in Major Barbara directed by Gabriel Pascal.
14.
Deborah Kerr became known playing the lead role in the film of Love on the Dole.
15.
Deborah Kerr was the female lead in Penn of Pennsylvania which was little seen; however Hatter's Castle, in which she starred with Robert Newton and James Mason, was very successful.
16.
Deborah Kerr played a Norwegian resistance fighter in The Day Will Dawn.
17.
Deborah Kerr 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.
18.
Deborah Kerr played three women in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
19.
Deborah Kerr made clear that her surname should be pronounced the same as "car".
20.
In 1943, aged 21, Deborah Kerr made her West End debut as Ellie Dunn in a revival of Heartbreak House at the Cambridge Theatre, stealing attention from stalwarts such as Edith Evans and Isabel Jeans.
21.
The film was a hit in the US, as well as the UK, and Deborah Kerr won the New York Film Critics Award as Actress of the Year.
22.
Deborah Kerr relocated to Hollywood and was under contract to MGM.
23.
Deborah Kerr's first film for MGM in Hollywood was a mature satire of the burgeoning advertising industry, The Hucksters with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner.
24.
Deborah Kerr received the first of her Oscar nominations for Edward, My Son, a drama set and filmed in England co-starring Spencer Tracy.
25.
Deborah Kerr, nevertheless, used any opportunity to discard her cool exterior.
26.
Deborah Kerr had the lead in a comedy Please Believe Me.
27.
Deborah Kerr then played Princess Flavia in a remake of The Prisoner of Zenda with Granger and Mason.
28.
In 1953, Deborah Kerr "showed her theatrical mettle" as Portia in Joseph Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar.
29.
Deborah Kerr made Young Bess with Granger and Jean Simmons, then appeared alongside Cary Grant in Dream Wife, a flop comedy.
30.
Deborah Kerr 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, for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.
31.
Deborah Kerr performed the same role in Vincente Minnelli's film adaptation released in 1956; her stage partner John Deborah Kerr appeared.
32.
In 1955, Deborah Kerr won the Sarah Siddons Award for her performance in Chicago during a national tour of the play.
33.
Deborah Kerr played the repressed wife in The End of the Affair, shot in England with Van Johnson.
34.
Deborah Kerr was a widow in love with William Holden in The Proud and Profane, directed by George Seaton.
35.
However Deborah Kerr then played Anna Leonowens in the film version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I ; with Yul Brynner in the lead, it was a huge hit.
36.
Deborah Kerr played a nun in Heaven Knows, Mr Allison opposite her long-time friend Robert Mitchum, directed by John Huston.
37.
Deborah Kerr starred in two films with David Niven: Bonjour Tristesse, directed by Otto Preminger, and Separate Tables, directed by Delbert Mann; the latter movie was particularly well received.
38.
Deborah Kerr made two films at MGM: The Journey reunited her with Brynner; Count Your Blessings, was a comedy.
39.
Deborah Kerr was reunited with Mitchum in The Sundowners shot in Australia, then The Grass Is Greener, co-starring Cary Grant.
40.
Deborah Kerr appeared in Gary Cooper's last film The Naked Edge and starred in The Innocents where she plays a governess tormented by apparitions.
41.
Deborah Kerr made her British TV debut in "Three Roads to Rome".
42.
Deborah Kerr was another governess in The Chalk Garden and worked with John Huston again in The Night of the Iguana.
43.
Deborah Kerr joined Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra in a love triangle for a romantic comedy, Marriage on the Rocks.
44.
Deborah Kerr replaced Kim Novak in Eye of the Devil with Niven, and was reteamed with Niven in the comedy Casino Royale, achieving the distinction of being, at 45, the oldest "Bond Girl" in any James Bond film, until Monica Bellucci, at the age of 50, in Spectre.
45.
Deborah Kerr made The Arrangement with Elia Kazan, her director from the stage production of Tea and Sympathy.
46.
Deborah Kerr returned to the cinema one more time in 1985's The Assam Garden.
47.
Deborah Kerr experienced a career resurgence on television in the early 1980s when she played the role of the nurse in Witness for the Prosecution, with Sir Ralph Richardson.
48.
Deborah Kerr took on the role of the older Emma Harte, a tycoon, in the adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance.
49.
Deborah Kerr rejoined old screen partner Mitchum in Reunion at Fairborough.
50.
Deborah Kerr died aged 86 on 16 October 2007 at Botesdale, a village in the county of Suffolk, England, from the effects of Parkinson's disease.
51.
Deborah Kerr is tied with Thelma Ritter and Amy Adams as the actresses with the second most nominations without winning, surpassed only by Glenn Close, who has been nominated eight times without winning.
52.
Deborah Kerr was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1998, but was unable to accept the honour in person because of ill health.
53.
Deborah Kerr was honoured in Hollywood, where she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1709 Vine Street for her contributions to the motion picture industry.
54.
Deborah Kerr was the first performer to win the New York Film Critics Circle Award for "Best Actress" three times.