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Deborah Kerr, Grace Kelly
THE NEW CLASS
Deborah Kerr in The Sundowners (1960).
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Frank Sinatra's career was not the only one revived by director Fred Zinnemann's willingness to cast against type in From Here to Eternity. Donna Reed, previously regarded as the perfect bourgeoise, brought this quality to the part of a whore longing for respectability and gave new depth to a standard movie role. More importantly, Miss Deborah Kerr, previously known as a glacially beautiful, terribly correct and respectable woman, suddenly manifested those qualities of fiery, desperate passion which no one before Zinnemann had the wit to tap for a screen role. The result was a triumph for Miss Kerr and yet another high point in a film which, for its perfection of tone and mood, is one of the high points of the decade's movie making, and of the new seriousness with which Hollywood was attempting to compete with television.
An English actress of classic beauty, Deborah Kerr had been playing rather frigid women since coming to Hollywood shortly after the war. Her screen character always suggested that there was more here than met the eye, that perhaps her icy manner was the result of repression rather than mere good breeding. It took the part of Karen in Eternity to make it clear that a real woman existed beneath that cool exterior. And, perhaps, it required new times to appreciate her womanly appeal, less blatant than that of most female stars in its blend of fire and ice.
Grace Kelly, younger, more kittenish when her defenses finally crumbled, but no less possessed of a fine beauty and a reserve that the vulgar know as "class," was the product of a wealthy and famous family, good schools, modeling and television. She made her first great impact in another Zinnemann picture, High Noon. In her role as an extremely ladylike Quaker, aroused finally to kill in defense of the man she loved, the public again saw the delicious combination of passion masked by coolness, reveled in the tension of waiting for the former to melt the latter. Hitchcock added the dimensions of worldliness and humor to her character in Rear Window and in To Catch a Thief.
Her career, of course, was interrupted by her royal marriage in 1956, but not before she had won an Academy Award for playing The Country Girl, a summation of the qualities which make up her type — reserve, morality and an underlying passion that is frequently devastating.