DEBORAH KERR and AUDREY HEPBURN: Celebrities of Stage and Screen (21)

        [This is a series describing British artistes who found fame on the stage or in the movies]

This piece recalls two beautiful and sensitive women who illuminated the stage and screen from 1940 onwards, whose showbiz lives were relatively normal, who set fashion standards and acted out their privileged existences with admirable modesty and discretion.

Deborah Kerr

Deborah Kerr (1921-2007) was born Deborah Kerr-Trimmer in Glasgow and spent her first 3 years in the charming nearby town of Helensburgh. Her father Arthur, who lost a leg at The Somme, was a naval architect and civil engineer and her mother Rose, (née Smale), had acting contacts. Deborah was educated privately at schools in Bristol and Weston. She first trained as a ballet dancer and made her debut in the Sadler’s Wells corps de ballet in 1938.

Considered too tall for ballet, she changed to acting in 1940 and soon appeared in the popular British films Major Barbara and Love on the Dole, both in 1941. A larger role in melodrama Hatter’s Castle (1942) opposite Robert Newton and James Mason confirmed her status and ushered in an association with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and starring roles in their off-beat classics The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and Black Narcissus (1947).

Kerr's triple roles in Colonel Blimp

Unstable Sister Clodagh in Black Narcissus

 

Kerr switched between the stage and screen, scoring a success in the West End with Shaw’s Heartbreak House in 1943 and touring the provincial theatres with Stewart Granger.

From 1945-59 Kerr was married to RAF pilot Tony Bartley and they had two daughters but the marriage was troubled as Bartley was jealous of his wife’s success. Kerr was no angel having affairs with Michael Powell, Stewart Granger and screen-writer Peter Viertel, whom she later married.

Kerr appeared in a number of popular films like King Solomon’s Mines, Quo Vadis? and The Prisoner of Zenda and made her Broadway debut in Tea and Sympathy in 1953 an enduring hit for her, playing a housemaster’s wife seducing a shy teenage pupil. Usually Kerr’s screen and stage persona was a rather prim and ladylike English rose, but she tired of this typecasting and revelled in the role of the adulterous officer’s wife in the 1953 Pearl Harbor block-buster From Here to Eternity – her scene cavorting on the beach with sergeant Burt Lancaster amid the waves became iconic.

Kerr unladylike in From Here to Eternity

 In 1956 Kerr won over a global audience playing a lively Anna opposite excellent Yul Brynner in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I even if her singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon.

Anna in The King and I

In 1957 Kerr played the part of Terry McKay, the singer who has a perfect shipboard romance with suave playboy Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember. The lovers promise to meet again 6 months later at the Empire State Building after they have sorted out their lives. Both rush there but Kerr is knocked down and crippled and they do not meet. She refuses to tell Grant of her handicap. Much later they meet and Grant realises why she is lying on a sofa and discovers her wheelchair and they end up in each other’s arms. This heart-warming romantic weepie is a landmark in the history of this kind of cinema.

Kerr and Grant reunited in An Affair to Remember

Kerr made The Sundowners in 1960, with longtime friend Robert Mitchum, a much admired saga with an Australian sheepfarming background – they had co-starred respectively as a nun and a US marine, marooned in the Pacific, in popular Heaven knows, Mr Allison in 1957.

Kerr’s great days were coming to their end. She made a few films in the 1960s but later limited herself on work on TV. She lived mainly in Klosters, Switzerland and Marbella, Spain with Peter Viertel. She became frail with Parkinson’s but was able to pick up a special Academy Award in 1994. She returned to England to be near her daughters and died in deepest Suffolk, aged 86, in 2007.

Kerr had won some terrific roles and hardly ever gave a dud performance. Her professionalism and inner dignity made her a greatly esteemed artiste.

-------------------------------------

Audrey Hepburn (1929 – 1993) was born Audrey Ruston in Ixelles, a suburb of Brussels, Belgium, the daughter of an Anglo-Austrian business man Victor Rushton and a Dutch aristocrat Ella van Heestra. Victor had been honorary British consul in Batavia (now Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) where he and Ella married, both for the second time. They lived in Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands. They separated in 1936 and Victor went to London, later appearing in Dublin. Both Victor and Ella were supporters of the British Union of Fascists, Victor keenly, Ella more tepidly, but it did not protect them in Nazi-occupied Europe.  

Audrey stayed with her mother and in 1937 started her education at a small (14-pupil) school in Kent. When war broke out in 1939 Ella thought she and Audrey would be safer in the Netherlands, neutral during WW1, and they moved to Arnhem, where there were family connections. In 1940 the Germans occupied the Netherlands and 4 years of mounting privation followed. Audrey was educated in Arnhem, learned the ballet but witnessed the murderous German deportation of Jews and the starvation of the Dutch people in the hard winter of 1944. Audrey herself suffered from malnutrition and this childhood experience had a profound influence on her later life.

Audrey Hepburn in 1954

Hepburn did not have overt sex appeal, like the Hollywood sirens, but rather a delicate elfin quality, with her prominent eyebrows, slim frame and a gift for comedy - all carried off with enchanting style and elegance. At the end of WW2 Hepburn studied ballet in Amsterdam and in 1948 moved with her mother to London and joined the Ballet Rambert. She was told she did not have a strong enough physique for eminence in that art and she instead turned to the theatre. She played in the chorus of several shows and bit parts in a few films until she met by chance the French writer Colette who was looking for the lead in her play Gigi. Colette took to Hepburn and she made her Broadway debut in 1951. She had arrived.

Quickly taken up by Hollywood, Hepburn starred in two classics, Roman Holiday (1953) with Gregory Peck and Sabrina (1954) opposite William Holden and Humphrey Bogart. For the first time Hepburn was dressed by her couturier and devoted later friend Hubert de Givenchy.

With Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday

 

Bogart, Hepburn and Holden in Sabrina

   

In 1954 Hepburn married the established American actor Mel Ferrer, who in effect became her manager. Ferrer was a controlling type, a latter-day Svengali, whose own career faded and he became jealous of Hepburn’s success. They had a son, Sean, but Hepburn miscarried three times. They acted together in the rather ponderous 1956 version of War and Peace but Hepburn as Natasha was a delight and all who saw her will remember her charm as she danced to the lovely strains of “Natasha’s Waltz”.

Ferrer and Hepburn in War and Peace

Hepburn also sang and danced with Fred Astaire (30 years her senior!) in Funny Face (1957) with songs by the Gershwins, but it was not a great success, though it did demonstrate that Hepburn could sing well enough.

Fine films rolled on. Hepburn was sympathetic in The Nun’s Story (1959), mainly set in the Congo, with Peter Finch and she was lovely as Holly Golightly in the much-bowdlerised version of Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). She wore her sleeveless “little black dress” designed by Givenchy, imitated the world over.

Audrey Hepburn at her most elegant

The 1960s saw Hepburn busy in films. Charade (1963) was an amusing thriller with Cary Grant but her great opportunity came when she was cast as Eliza Doolittle in the Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady (1965) opposite Rex Harrison. Hepburn, dressed by Cecil Beaton for the Ascot and Ball scenes was sensational though she was mortified that she was not allowed to sing and her voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon.The film was a huge international success.

Hepburn as Eliza in My Fair Lady

She teamed up with Albert Finney for the romantic comedy Two for the Road (1966) and her affair with Finney finally triggered off her divorce from Mel Ferrer. In 1969 she married Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, but his infidelities were serial and their unhappy union lasted until 1982, although they had one son, Luca. Her final substantial film was the thriller Wait until Dark, (1967) which won her several awards, her acting ability proving she was never just a clothes-horse but an intelligent artiste.

Fired by her experiences in the German-Occupied Netherlands, Hepburn had done some work for UNICEF since 1956 but in the 1980s her commitment became her driving force. She toured famine-ravaged Ethiopia, Turkey for an immunisation campaign, Central America, Sudan, Vietnam, for a water purification push and anarchic Somalia. She was showered with honours for her humanitarian efforts. She had been at last living happily since 1980 with the Dutch actor Robert Wolders in Tolochenaz, Switzerland. She contracted a rare and inoperable form of appendiceal cancer and died there in 1993 aged 63. 

Audrey Hepburn was an enchanting screen presence and an admirable person who is much missed.

SMD

24.02.15

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015