Deborah Kerr, 86; actress mixed saintly, sin

Deborah Kerr, 86, the cultivated Scottish rose beloved in such 1950s blockbusters as

From Here to Eternity

,

The King and I

, and

An Affair to Remember

, died Tuesday in Suffolk, England. For many years she had battled Parkinson's disease with the dignified grace and quiet wit she brought to her many roles.

One of the most-cited performers never to win a competitive Oscar, Miss Kerr (pronounced "car") was nominated six times before belatedly receiving an honorary statuette in 1994. In a trembling voice at what would be her last public appearance, she said to the assembled: "Thank you for giving me a happy life."

Though the alabaster-skinned redhead was honored that evening for her "impeccable grace and beauty," the secret of Miss Kerr's singular appeal was her devil-may-care peccability. She played ladies who didn't mind if their tramp showed.

Whether it was as the nun struggling to repress her desire in Black Narcissus (1947), the married woman who relished an adulterous roll in the surf with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity (1953), the teacher's wife who beds a student who may be homosexual in Tea and Sympathy (1956), or the kept woman drawn to kept man Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember (1957), Miss Kerr projected propriety and sexuality.

Her flutelike voice was also unique. She made music out of ordinary dialogue.

Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer, daughter of a Scottish naval officer who served in World War I, was born in Helensburgh, Scotland, in 1921.

When she was 5 the family moved to Bristol, England, where the famously shy girl studied dance at her aunt's academy. Her training there may account for her dancer's way of sailing through space. Through her aunt's connections, she got work with the Oxford Repertory Company and made her film debut, supporting Wendy Hiller, in Major Barbara (1941).

Showing her versatility and range, she played three roles in Michael Powell's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), which, along with her extraordinary performance as the nun in Powell's Black Narcissus, got Hollywood's attention.

Not long after marrying former RAF squadron leader Anthony Bartley in 1945, Miss Kerr was imported to MGM Studios, where mogul Louis B. Mayer molded her in the Jeanette MacDonald/Greer Garson form of great lady.

"Deborah Kerr/Rhymes With Star" was the promotion given to the demure actress appearing opposite brazen Ava Gardner in The Hucksters (1947). They were the genteel girl and the brassy babe vying for Clark Gable's attention.

She was decorative and unmemorable in prestige pictures such as King Solomon's Mines (1950) and Quo Vadis (1951). It was only after replacing Joan Crawford as the sex-starved army wife in From Here to Eternity that Miss Kerr made an American film equal to her British work. Her ability to project the contradictory aspects of character helped her to create a new screen archetype, the very proper adulteress.

However varied her Hollywood roles, she delivered performances of greater nuance and depth in the European-made films The End of the Affair (1955) - again, as a conscience-stricken adulteress - and Bonjour, Tristesse (1958), as a fashion designer provoked by her lover's daughter.

Despite these more adventurous roles, the image of Miss Kerr as prude persisted. The story goes that on the set of Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) - starring the actress as a nun and Robert Mitchum as a lusty soldier stranded on an island - Mitchum worried that he might offend Her Primness. When Miss Kerr tore into director John Huston after a sequence shot in the water, the actor was so shocked that he nearly drowned laughing.

In 1959, Miss Kerr and Bartley, who had two daughters, divorced. The following year she married author Peter Viertel, whose novel White Hunter, Black Heart was a thinly veiled portrait of Huston.

No other actress - not Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day nor Elizabeth Taylor - enjoyed more popular success in the second half of the 1950s than Miss Kerr. In An Affair to Remember, an improbably effective romance that is the basis for Sleepless in Seattle, she convinced the world that the Empire State Building was the closest place New York had to heaven. In The King and I she whistled a happy tune, and the world whistled along.

It still does.

Miss Kerr is survived by Viertel, her husband of 47 years; two daughters; and three grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are incomplete.

See a Kerr filmography and more photos via http://go.philly.com/kerr EndText