Even before Kerr went to Hollywood, the anonymous writer of Time could define her as ‘everything Englishmen mean when they become lyrical about roses’. Although written about Black Narcissus, these words also describe her first important part in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), in which she plays the three women in the life of Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), suggesting the idea that, at least in Powell and Pressburger’s powerful construction of male Englishness, ‘Englishmen always fall in love with the same type of woman’. If Major Barbara, Kerr’s first film, already anticipated a great deal of her future star persona, Blimp, the film after which she became an established name, firmly placed her as a figment of the male imagination, as an image of idealised English femininity and one clearly attached to past models of womanhood. As Jeffrey Richards has recently argued, whereas Blimp becomes ‘the embodiment of a chivalric ideal overtaken by the grim reality of modern war’, the three characters played by Kerr are, in a very real sense, ‘the same woman, the eternal, sensible, forthright, independent-spirited British woman’.
- from “The nun’s story: femininity and Englishness in the films of Deborah Kerr“ by C. Deleyto, “British stars and stardom: from Alma Taylor to Sean Connery”, 2001, p.122
(Source: fuckyeahdeborahkerr)
