 Deborah Kerr has died, after a long bout with Parkinson's, at eighty-six. The Scottish-born Kerr first made her mark in English movies with big, challenging roles in the Powell and Pressburger films The Life and Death of Major Blimp and Black Narcissus. In 1946, she made her first Hollywood film, co-starring with Clark Gable in The Hucksters, but probably her best-remembered screen pairing was with Burt Lancaster in the 1953 From Here to Eternity, where their iconic kissing scene lying on a beach set an enduring standard for thirtysomething romance. (Sixteen years later, director John Frankenheimer reunited the two of them for The Gypsy Moths, a yawner perhaps most notable for featuring the then forty-eight-year-old actress's only nude scene.)
Although she could be a charming ingenue, from the start of her career there was always something about Kerr that suggested a maturity beyond her years. If that put off some executives who liked their actresses simpering, it made for a strong presence and the ability to bring suggestions of depth and emotional complication to the right role. She triumphed in such parts as the adulterous military wife in From Here to Eternity and the loving but discontented wife of an Australian rover (Robert Mitchum) in The Sundowners, directed — like Eternity — by Fred Zinnemann. She won Oscar nominations for both those films, as she did for The King and I and Separate Tables. (She was nominated a total of six times without winning, though she was given a special honorary career Oscar in 1993.) She basically retired from movies after 1969, though she came back once to star in the small 1985 English picture The Assam Garden and sometimes turned up on TV until 1986; she also starred in the original Broadway production of Edward Albee's Seascape in 1975. Her survivors include her husband of forty-seven years, Peter Viertel, the author of the novel White Hunter, Black Heart. — Phil Nugent
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