Deborah Jane Kerr was the daughter of an officer. She lost her father at age 14 and later moved with her mother in the neighborhood of Bristol. There she attended boarding school until 1936, the Northumberland House, then headed by her aunt, Phyllis Smale Hicks-Smale Drama School, gained his first acting experience in amateur theatricals, and read children's stories for BBC Radio Bristol. In 1937 she moved to London and attended the ballet school of the Sadler's Wells Theater, where she first appeared in 1938 as a dancer. After first small acting roles in Shakespeare productions at the Open Air Theater in Regent's Park, London, and in 1940 an ensemble member of the Oxford Playhouse. In the same year she landed a small role in George Bernard Shaw-film Major Barbara by Gabriel Pascal. During the war she performed in France, Belgium and Holland at the front theaters for the Allied troops. She met her first husband, the fighter Anthony Bartley, whom she married 1945th The marriage which produced two daughters, Melanie Jane and Francesca Ann, was divorced 1959th

1947 she succeeded with Black Narcissus breakthrough as an actress. This role gave her a contract at MGM. There she played her first role alongside Clark Gable in The Hucksters. Because of their patrician appearance, the actress was traded from the studio as the legitimate successor of Greer Garson and mainly used as a tea-drinking lady. The tearful romance When Winter Comes, therefore, they sat beside Walter Pidgeon, the longtime partner of Garson book. An exception was her performance as an alcoholic wife of Spencer Tracy in Edward, My Son, who introduced her in 1949, the first of six Oscar nominations.

She was often seen at the side of Stewart Granger, with whom she went and Others, 1950 King Solomon's Mines on an expedition in the studio jungle. At the side of Robert Taylor in 1951, the young Christian woman she embodied Lygia in Mervyn Leroy's epic Quo Vadis. The movie, filmed by MGM in Italy, had been originally started with Gregory Peck and Elizabeth Taylor in the lead roles.

1953 Deborah Kerr played a small supporting role in the historical film, the successor to the throne next to Jean Simmons, which had risen since their involvement in Black Narcissus himself a star in Hollywood. Had the same year she managed a successful change of image: After Joan Crawford is Damn withdrawn due to disagreements over the script and the choice of costumes from participation in Fred Zinnemann for all eternity, Deborah Kerr took over the role of Karen Holmes, an officer's wife and passionate adulteress alongside Burt Lancaster. Kerr-British supercooled and simultaneously bubbling under the surface Aura contrasted effectively with the macho kind of Lancaster.

In 1956 she became the female lead as Anna Leonowens alongside Yul Brynner in the film version of The King and I. One of her due to numerous repetitions in the best-known television roles, she played one years later, in the remake of Irene Dunne - Charles Boyer classic Love Affair: The love of my life. As their biggest challenge, the actress described her role as a repressed young woman separated from bed and board from the year 1958. Her fellow actors David Niven won for his role a Oscar. In the confused James Bond parody Casino Royale (1967) she played alongside a team of world stars, the murderous wife of British intelligence chiefs, "M" (John Huston). David Niven was in this film, one of the many James Bonds.

Elia Kazan's The Arrangement was in 1969 her last Hollywood film. Then she looked up in 1985 in British film and television productions, including the remake of Billy Wilder classic Witness for the Prosecution, and appeared regularly at the Broadway and London's West End.

Kerr recently lived with her second husband, the writer Peter Viertel, whom she married in 1960, in Klosters, Switzerland. She was sick of Parkinson's. Despite her illness, she took her 1994 conferred honorary Oscar to meet in person in Hollywood. 1998 was it the Commander of the Most Excellent Order of The British Empire awarded.

In August 2004, her brother Edward (Teddy), a living retired journalist, killed in West Heath, Birmingham.

Robert Mitchum, the actor turned the three films together, described the chemistry between them as well so that you could turn their shared scenes at separate locations, and the result would be spliced together a perfect match.

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