“Rhymes with star,” according to the MGM publicity back in the late 1940s. She was elegant, refined…yet you knew she knew more than she was letting onto—especially when holding her own as the ‘spinster pushing 40’ against earthy Ava Gardner in Night of the Iguana. (They formed an intriguing yin and yang in The Hucksters as well.) Deborah Kerr may have looked like delicate china, but there was a goodtime girl percolating in there for sure—the mind does cartwheels imagining her on location with Robert Mitchum and John Huston and Heaven knows! how many cases of booze. She was tough, resourceful and quite beautiful under the dust in The Sundowners and King Solomon’s Mines; an Irish fireball ingénue in I See a Dark Stranger (Kerr was Scottish by birth); a hot tomato in the surf in From Here to Eternity; aware of what was flowing between the lines of Bonjour tristesse. Plus her work for the Archers, Colonel Blimp and Black Narcissus, tickets to timelessness. She could make dross and mediocrity worth watching, recognized quality in the making, and held the lens with ease.
5 Comments:
Great Blog!
Very nice "hommage". And your illustration is to fall. A great Lady vanish.
Thank you ShadowCat and Vincent!
"Tickets to timelessness," indeed. I can always count on Flickhead to have a perfect picture, one that I won't see anywhere else.
wasn't she divine?
I didn't appreciate her beauty and manner until I was in my 40s, Siren. Of course, after the light went on, I devoured nearly everything she was ever in.
But the teaming of her with Ava Gardner will always stand out for me...amazing casting!
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