Deborah Kerr was born 100 years ago today in Helensburgh,
Scotland. The “openly sexual” characters that Denby had in mind were
undoubtedly the compassionate (and neglected) football coach’s wife in Tea
and Sympathy and the bitter (and horribly hurt) officer’s wife in From
Here to Eternity.
Kerr’s versatility and range enabled her to elevate
even decidedly pedestrian material to something like a touch of class. With
stronger scripts, such as From Here to Eternity and the 1961 adaptation
of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” The Innocents, she played a central
part in the making of classics.
Long after her film heyday, I saw her in a 1980s TV remake
of Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution. I chuckled at the starchiness
she injected into the barrister’s nurse played in the original by Elsa
Lanchester. I kept hoping, in vain, to see more of her.
The next time I saw her was far sadder: in 1994, when
Hollywood finally got around to awarding her the Oscar she should have won
decades before (and even this time, it was a consolation prize—an honorary Lifetime Achievement Award). My heart sank at the sight of the nervous, aging
woman onstage far from the vibrant actress of my memory.
Fortunately, we have those films to remind us of her
subtlety, elegance—and a deeper, luminous quality present in the accompanying photo,
explained, not long before her death in 2007, by her second husband, writer Peter
Viertel:
“The camera goes right through the skin. The camera
brings out what you are, and in her case, there was always a kind of a humanity
that she had in all of the things that she played . . . I think she made movies
that have never worn off their splendor.”
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