From Her to Eternity: The Enduring Icy Hotness of Deborah Kerr

By Jessica Kiang

Features—

Sep 30, 2021

From Her to Eternity: The Enduring Icy Hotness of Deborah Kerr
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Every time Miss Giddens walks past the white roses that accent every room in the gloomy mansion setting of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, a shiver of petals falls to the floor. But the roses are newly cut and shouldn’t shed; we can see them blooming in the garden, fresh and alive, dewdrops clinging to them prettily like tears. Beyond what we can see of her—straight back; tightly trussed, high-necked gowns; neat hair; placid expression—it’s as if there is some invisible astringency that flows outward from the governess, rotting the flowers, corrupting the pure.

It’s this quality in The Innocents—a version of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw that all but dispenses with the novella’s ambiguity by portraying the governess protagonist as almost certainly not-haunted, and almost definitely batshit insane with hysterically repressed and tragically projected sexual paranoia—that makes the role a kind of apotheosis for the often misapprehended Deborah Kerr. Her best roles not only played on her willingness to subvert the unshakable image of pristine probity that became attached to her, they relied on it: Miss Giddens would not be half so terrifying if her porcelain exterior had, at the outset, a single hairline crack in it. It is her aura of scrupulous competence and brisk, British common sense that makes her madness so deliciously perverse.

Top of page: Black Narcissus; above: The Innocents

Perhaps we are starting to appreciate Deborah Kerr for the fabulous mess of contradictions she could so effortlessly embody. But in her time, and for a good while after, she was rather more blandly typecast in the popular imagination. When the Academy awarded her an honorary Oscar in 1994—more than thirty years after her sixth nomination—it hailed her as “a dedicated actress whose motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and elegance.” The New York Times review of Kerr’s first Hollywood title, Jack Conway’s advertising satire The Hucksters, opined, “Miss Kerr is a very soothing person.” These are nice compliments but not particularly sexy descriptors, especially for a woman who, in rolling around on top of Burt Lancaster on a beach in Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity, became 50 percent of the most famously torrid movie still in history. (Or maybe 40 percent if we count not just Lancaster but also the foaming Hawaiian surf as her costars.)

The Kerr paradox of warmth and coolness, of sensuality existing alongside—even feeding off—reserve, was there from the beginning of her career, which makes the flattening out of her star persona all the more striking. All four of the pictures she made in Britain immediately prior to Hollywood stardom understood what Michael Powell—her onetime lover and two-time director—said of her, that “Deborah was both the ideal and [a] flesh-and-blood woman.” Powell used that dichotomy three times over in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, casting Kerr as the three women who entrance Roger Livesey’s reminiscing military man at different points in his life. But the hot/cold contradiction is even more potent distilled into a single role: in 1947’s voluptuously sensual Black Narcissus, Kerr’s icy Sister Clodagh is brought to the precipice of madness by her unworkable lust for David Farrar’s rough-hewn hunk of libidinous masculinity (an archetype that occurs surprisingly often opposite Kerr); if she doesn’t fall in, it’s only because Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) beats her to it.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

In between her two Powell and Pressburger films, Kerr made Vacation from Marriage—an incongruously jaunty title when you consider the vacation in question is World War II. Directed by Alexander Korda, it’s one of the great makeover movies, serving as an almost on-the-nose encapsulation of those contrary impulses: Kerr plays a dowdy housewife whose dull marriage is revitalized when both she and her husband (Robert Donat) find new avenues of fulfilment within the war effort, develop passions for other people, and, well, become hot. Conversely, in I See a Dark Stranger, Kerr’s Bridie Quilty is a character unforgivably on the wrong side of history while that history was still in progress (the film was released after the war but shot while it was still ongoing). So it’s quite the endorsement of the actress’s charm that the role of the fiery Irish nationalist who becomes a Nazi spy could still exude enough inherent decency to stop her from getting whatever the 1940s equivalent of “canceled” was.

This early run of fraught and complex roles also thwarts the film historian’s attempt to explain Kerr’s career in terms of the obvious paradigm in which a star image is established early on and then gradually subverted. It would be much neater if we could say, for example, that Sister Clodagh was a mature actress’s reaction against the comparatively uncomplicated Sister Angela, the nun she played opposite Robert Mitchum’s rough-hewn hunk of masculine etc. in John Huston’s Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. But Kerr made Black Narcissus at twenty-six, a full decade before Huston’s film. Similar counterpoints occur throughout her filmography: her frank embrace of wartime passion in From Here to Eternity preceded her character’s self-denial in The End of the Affair (an unjustly overlooked version of Graham Greene’s tragic tale of God, faith, and unfaithfulness); the honorable-seeming but deeply sinister Miss Giddens came before Miss Madrigal, the shady but ultimately honorable governess in Ronald Neame’s The Chalk Garden.

The chronology of Kerr’s filmography defies the easy categorization of her evolution as an actor. The nuns, governesses, and unhappy wives she specialized in did not develop in a straight line from naive and simple to worldly and complex over the course of her career; more often than not they were characters encompassing both ends of that spectrum. Across her filmography but also within many of her individual roles, Kerr embodied the key conundrum of mid-twentieth-century womanhood: the eternal battle between desire and decency, passion and propriety, personal fulfillment and the dictates of a respectable life.

Even in her most successful, broad-appeal films, like Zinnemann’s The Sundowners, Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember, and Walter Lang’s The King and I (probably the movie most responsible for Kerr’s misleading reputation as a model of unbending rectitude and clipped patrician consonants), there is always more to Kerr’s characters than she’s given credit for. In these three titles, there’s her humor—it’s easy to forget how funny she could be, whether sniping at Yul Brynner’s pompous King of Siam, bickering lovingly with Mitchum’s laid-back drover, or catching playboy Cary Grant’s eye by pulling a face at him over a cigarette case. Indeed, it’s strange that we now remember An Affair to Remember less for the delightful romantic comedy of its first two-thirds and more for the keeping-my-paralysis-secret thing—one of the most nonsensical contrivances in cinema history, almost rendered believable because a Kerr character can display both lively, warm, self-deprecating wit and a deeply pointless impulse toward stoic, self-sacrificing martyrdom.

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An Affair to Remember

In Huston’s fervid The Night of the Iguana (this time starring Richard Burton as the rough-hewn etc.), worldly virgin Hannah Jelkes twitters and trills about the soul-soothing value of a nice meal, then abruptly hacks the head off a fish with a cleaver. Kerr’s characters pivot on unexpected oppositions, but she carries them so lightly and brightly, with disingenuous eyes that seem to contain no deceit, that we seldom question their unlikeliness. It makes her far more interesting than the “perfection” that her erstwhile reputation implies—there are very few of her roles not defined by imperfection, by internal contradictions, odd angularities, and secret deviances. And so the most emblematic images of her might just be those in which her perfect form is mussed and made imperfect, in which she’s wet with saltwater, the hem of her habit is rimmed in grime, and her alabaster forehead is beaded with perspiration. In the finale of The Innocents, the sweat on her brow is like the cool dew on the roses and also like the condensation on the humid greenhouse window, and you cannot say, were you to touch her, whether she’d be feverishly hot or icy cold. That’s the beautiful enigma of Deborah Kerr: we can never know if she is burning up or thawing out.

Jessica Kiang is a Berlin-based freelance film critic and programmer.

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