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

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.)

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.

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.