How much was Deborah Kerr worth?
| Net Worth: | $10 Million |
|---|---|
| Profession: | Professional Actress |
| Date of Birth: | September 30, 1921 |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Height: | 1.7 m |
About Deborah Kerr
Deborah Jane Trimmer, better known by her stage name Deborah Kerr (30 September 1921–16 October 2007), was a British actress who appeared in movies, plays, and television. Her estimated net worth was $10 million. In terms of lead actress nominations without a victory, Kerr now maintains the record. She received an Academy Honorary Award and a total of six nominations. They praised Kerr as “an artist of impeccable grace and beauty, a dedicated actress whose motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and elegance”
Deborah Kerr, a former ballet dancer and stage actress, rose to fame in Hollywood in the 1950s after leaving her native United Kingdom. During the war, she began producing British movies, which caught the notice of director Michael Powell, who put Kerr in some of her best roles.
Kerr was nominated six times for Best Actress at the Academy Awards, but she lost all five times, making her one of the best actors to never get the award. Regardless, Kerr was a well-liked figure who oozed grace and polish, making her one of the most admired leading ladies of classic Hollywood.
Earlier Years
On September 30, 1921, Kerr was born in Helensburgh, Scotland, and began studying ballet at the Northumberland House Boarding School when she was five years old. She was accepted into the Hicks-Smale Drama School at the age of 16, where she continued to study dance and developed her acting skills.
In 1937, Kerr made her stage debut as a mime in the film Harlequin and Columbine. The following year, she made her ballet debut in Prometheus. She took up a number of small Shakespearean roles in the Open-Air Theatre in Regent’s Park at this time.
Early Years
Following this, Kerr joined the Oxford Playhouse Repertory Company in 1940. However, she soon made the leap to film, making her screen debut in the 1940 spy thriller Contraband. After that, in Major Barbara (1941) and the Depression-era drama Love on the Dole, she portrayed a Salvation Army employee (1941).
After acting alongside Robert Newton and James Mason in the British noir Hatter’s Castle (1942), Kerr collaborated with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger on The Life and Death of Colonel Plimp. In order to play three different characters at once—a woman working in Berlin during the Boer War, a nurse in France during World War I, and the driver of a British commander (Roger Livesey) during World War II—the actress went above and beyond.
She was given permission to stay in England but was given a contract with MGM for her performance in Colonel Plimp. In the humorous spy thriller I See a Dark Stranger, Kerr gave a superb performance as an Irish girl who unknowingly works for the Nazis, after a role opposite Robert Donat in Perfect Strangers (1945). (1946).
For what would turn out to be their best joint effort, Black Narcissus (1947), Kerr and Michael Powell reconnected. This dazzling and subtly sexy movie stunned audiences at the time with its suggestive visuals. She played Sister Clodagh, a determined nun who spearheads an endeavor to establish an Anglican hospital and school in the Himalayas. However, after meeting Mr. Dean (David Farrar), a dapper British agent, she finds herself attracted to him romantically. Kerr’s outstanding performance brought her praise from both sides of the Atlantic and made it possible for her to move to the United States.
Kerr in the movies
When Kerr first arrived in Hollywood, she was frequently presented as a proper British woman who always emanated class and grace. Kerr made her American debut in the satirical drama The Hucksters starring Clark Gable the same year she released Black Narcissus. With an outstanding portrayal as the alcoholic wife of a successful businessman (Spencer Tracy) who will do anything to protect his kid in the 1949 film Edward, My Son, she received her first nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actress.
The opulent adventure King Solomon’s Mines starred Kerr as an Irishwoman searching for her missing husband alongside a courageous explorer (Stewart Granger) (1950). After that, she rejoined with Granger as Prince Flavia to his King Rudolf V in a remake of The Prisoner of Zenda from 1937, playing an early Christian woman in the Roman historical epic Quo Vadis? (1952).
When it came to portraying Portia in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1953 production of Julius Caesar, which starred Marlon Brando as Mark Antony and James Mason as Brutus, Kerr drew on her early Shakespearean training. Following a brief detour into romantic comedy with Cary Grant in Dream Wife (1953), Kerr rose to fame with Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity (1953).
On the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kerr played a blonde American woman having an adulterous affair with an army sergeant (Burt Lancaster), ditching her image as a prim and proper Englishwoman and her red hair in the process. From Here to Eternity earned her a second Oscar nomination for Best Actress, an award she should have won over rookie Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. It was a risky performance that featured a classic sequence with Kerr and Lancaster kissing while the waves of the Pacific Ocean smash around them.
After that failure, Kerr made her Broadway debut in 1953 with Tea and Sympathy, a play that was eventually transformed into a 1956 movie under the direction of Vincente Minnelli, giving her the opportunity to repeat her stage role. After that, Kerr went on to star in one of her most well-known performances as Anna Leonowens, a British governess who was assigned to teach the children of the King of Siam (Yul Brynner), only for her to fall in love with the conventional monarch (1956). For the part, Kerr received her third Oscar nomination for Best Actress in her acting career.
In Heaven Knows, Mrs. Allison (1957), directed by John Huston, Kerr portrayed a Catholic nun who was stranded with Robert Mitchum’s marine sergeant on an island in the South Pacific surrounded by Japanese troops. This role earned Kerr her fourth nomination for an Academy Award. She received her fifth and final Academy Award nomination for her performance as the wife of a sheep herder (Mitchum) in Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners. She had evident chemistry with Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember (1960).
Future Career
Following The Sundowners and her second marriage to author Peter Viertel, Kerr’s acting career stagnated in the 1960s before she finally quit performing altogether at the end of the decade. In The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s superb gothic horror film, Kerr played a governess in charge of looking after two possessee children after the romantic comedy The Grass is Greener (1960). (1961). She then co-starred with Gary Cooper in the psychological suspense film The Naked Edge (1961), and in The Night of the Iguana, she played a suppressed artist to Richard Burton’s defrocked minister (1964).
As the decade progressed, Kerr made less and fewer film appearances, most notably in the supernatural thriller Eye of the Devil when she played a woman who was far too interested (1966). With Casino Royale (1967), she became the oldest Bond Girl ever at the age of 47. More importantly, she also had her first and only nude scene in The Gypsy Moths, John Frankenheimer’s failed skydiving drama (1969).
Due to the increasing degree of violence and nastiness onscreen as well as the lack of roles for women of a particular age, Kerr felt it was time to leave the movie industry after Elia Kazan’s catastrophic melodrama The Arrangement (1969). Before finally calling it a day in 1986, Kerr performed on stage and in front of the camera for the following two decades.
She was given an Honorary Oscar in 1993 at the 66th Annual Academy Awards by the star of the show Glenn Close. When Close helped Kerr to the microphone, it was clear that Kerr’s health was failing by that point. She stayed out of the public eye for the rest of her life, in part because Parkinson’s disease had rendered her wheelchair-bound.
On October 18, 2007, Kerr passed away at Botesdal, Suffolk, England. Age-wise, she was 86. Deborah Kerr’s total assets at the time of her passing were $10 million.
Three weeks later, her husband Peter Viertel passed away from cancer.
