Deborah Kerr, versatile British actress, dies at 86

Deborah Kerr, a versatile actress who long projected the quintessential image of the proper, tea-sipping Englishwoman but who was also indelible in one of the most sexually provocative scenes of the 1950s, with Burt Lancaster in "From Here to Eternity," died Tuesday in Suffolk, England. She was 86.

Her death was announced to The Associated Press by her agent, Anne Hutton. She had Parkinson's disease.

Kerr was nominated for six Academy Awards, without winning any, over more than four decades as a major Hollywood movie star. She finally received an honorary Oscar for her lifetime of work in 1994. Mostly in retirement since the mid-1980s, she lived for many years in Switzerland with her husband, Peter Viertel, a novelist and screenwriter.

The lovemaking on the beach in Hawaii with Lancaster, viewed with both of them in wet swimsuits as the tide came in, was hardly what anyone expected of Deborah Kerr at that point in her career. Along with Greer Garson and Jean Simmons, she was one of three leading ladies Americans thought of as typically British, and decidedly refined and upper-class. More than once she was referred to by directors, producers and newspapers as the "British virgin."

Time magazine, in a 1947 feature article, predicted that she would be one of the great movie stars because "while she could act like Ingrid Bergman, she was really a kind of converted Greer Garson, womanly enough to show up nicely in those womanly roles."

Throughout her career, Kerr worked at being unpredictable. She was believable as a steadfast nun in "Black Narcissus," as the love-hungry wife of an empty-headed army captain stationed at Pearl Harbor in "From Here to Eternity," as a headmaster's spouse who sleeps with an 18-year-old student to prove to him that he is a man in "Tea and Sympathy," as a spunky schoolmarm not afraid to joust and dance with the King of Siam in "The King and I," as a Salvation Army lass in "Major Barbara" and even as Portia, the Roman matron married to Brutus, in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar."

She could be virginal, ethereal, gossamer and fragile, or earthy, spicy and suggestive, and sometimes she managed to display all her skills at the same time.

Kerr made "From Here to Eternity" even though Harry Cohn, chief of Columbia Pictures in that era, had wanted Joan Crawford in the part and had to be persuaded to accept Kerr. She regarded the role as the high point in her climb to stardom in the United States, and it yielded her second Academy Award nomination.

Another high point came in 1956, when she was given the film role that Gertrude Lawrence had played on the stage in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "The King and I."

She also received Oscar nominations for "Edward, My Son" (released in 1949), "Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison" (1957), "Separate Tables" (1958) and "The Sundowners" (1960).

Kerr was married to Anthony Bartley, an Englishman who had been a decorated fighter pilot during World War II, for 13 years. They were divorced in 1960 became final the next year. In 1969, she married Viertel, who survives her.

Andrée de Jongh, whose youth and even younger appearance belied her courage and ingenuity when she became a World War II legend ushering many downed Allied airmen on a treacherous, 1,000-mile path from occupied Belgium to safety, died Saturday in Brussels. She was 90.

Her death was announced by a Web site for former resistance fighters, verzet.org.

De Jongh led 24 to 33 expeditions across occupied France, over the Pyrenees to Gibraltar. She herself escorted 118 servicemen to safety. At least 300 more escaped along the Comet line.

When the Germans captured her in 1943, it was her youth that saved her. When she truthfully confessed responsibility for the entire scheme, they refused to believe her.

After 20 interrogations, the Germans still refused to believe her confession and she was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

She later worked in leper hospitals in the Belgian Congo and Ethiopia.

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