Deborah Kerr: Scotland’s first hope in Hollywood

By the end of the decade, she was already being coveted by Hollywood producers. Her performance in Powell and Pressburger’s classic Black Narcissus opened the doors for Kerr to head across the Atlantic and mix it up with some of the biggest stars and most lauded filmmakers cinema has ever produced.

She wasn’t the first Scot to find success in America, but she was undoubtedly the most prominent. Kerr’s versatility and dynamism kept her profile high even in an era when the competition for starring roles was about as fierce as it’s ever been.

Co-starring with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner in 1947’s The Hucksters was an impressive way to make a Hollywood debut, with Kerr going on to rub shoulders with Spencer Tracy in Edward, My Son two years later, which earned her the first of six nominations for ‘Best Actress’ at the Academy Awards.

Playing the female lead in box office hits King Solomon’s Mines and Quo Vadis reinforced her star power and name value, with Kerr continuing to mix it up with Tinseltown’s elite talents. She worked with Cary Grant in Dream Wife, An Affair to Remember, and The Grass is Greener, was directed by John Huston in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, shared the screen with Gregory Peck in Beloved Infidel, and smouldered with Yul Brynner in The King and I.

Gary Cooper’s final feature, The Naked Edge, influential horror flick The Innocents, a reunion with Huston on The Night of the Iguana, and romantic comedy Marriage on the Rocks alongside Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra kept her busy throughout the 1960s, while she also played a Bond girl in the star-studded Casino Royale spoof and collaborated with Elia Kazan on The Arrangement.

Despite enjoying such success, though, the roles began to try up for Kerr towards the end of the 1960s, which saw her take an extended sabbatical from film that began in 1969 and didn’t end until she made her last movie appearance in 1985’s The Assam Garden.

She may have gone zero-for-six in terms of competitive Oscars, but Kerr was finally awarded an honorary trophy from the Academy in 1994, where she was celebrated as “an artist of impeccable grace and beauty, a dedicated actress whose motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and elegance”. Scotland has produced plenty of cinematic stars since, but it was the Hillhead-born actor who became the first of her countrymen and countrywomen to emerge as a certifiable Hollywood star.

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