The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (223 page)

After that she married Prince Rainier (in 1956) and confined herself to being the most plausible princess in the world, to distributing the prizes at the Monaco Grand Prix, and to hostessing charity concerts. The nearest to a comeback seems to have been an initial interest in playing
Marnie
.

She was killed in a car accident, driving on roads very close to those used in
To Catch a Thief
—where she had once driven so fast.

Kay Kendall
(Kay Justine Kendall McCarthy) (1926–59), b. Withernsea, England
For some ten years, Kay Kendall flitted around the British cinema trying not to look too tall or too obviously a
Vogue
cover girl. It was
Genevieve
(53, Henry Cornelius) that revealed her as a comedienne bemused by her own lofty handsomeness. She flourished briefly, married actor Rex Harrison, and made two good films in Hollywood before dying of leukemia. The British were suitably affected but still indifferent to their long neglect of her.

The daughter of dancers, and granddaughter of Marie Kendall, she played in variety before making her debut in
Fiddlers Three
(44, Harry Watt). Thereafter, she was in
Champagne Charlie
(44, Alberto Cavalcanti);
Dreaming
(44, John Baxter);
Waltz Time
(45, Paul L. Stein); and
London Town
(46, Wesley Ruggles). Unwelcomed, she worked in the theatre and TV before a second attempt:
Dance Hall
(50, Charles Crichton);
Happy Go Lovely
(51, Bruce Humberstone);
Lady Godiva Rides Again
(51, Frank Launder);
Wings of Danger
(52, Terence Fisher);
It Started in Paradise
(52, Compton Bennett);
Street of Shadows
(53, Richard Vernon); and
The Square Ring
(53, Basil Dearden and Michael Relph). After her eccentric, trumpet-playing girlfriend in
Genevieve
, she was rewarded with
Doctor in the House
(54, Ralph Thomas),
Simon and Laura
(55, Muriel Box), and
The Constant Husband
(55, Sidney Gilliat) in which she played opposite Harrison. She then went into American films:
The Adventures of Quentin Durward
(55, Richard Thorpe);
Abdullah’s Harem
(56, Gregory Ratoff);
Les Girls
(57, George Cukor)—her best film;
The Reluctant Debutante
(58, Vincente Minnelli), with Harrison again; and
Once More With Feeling
(59, Stanley Donen), which has a very funny harp-playing sequence—she was an actress who made unexpected music.

Arthur Kennedy
(1914–90), b. Worcester, Massachusetts
Kennedy was educated at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Originally on the stage, he was one of the subtlest American supporting actors, never more so than when revealing the malice or weakness in an ostensibly friendly man. He made his screen debut in Litvak’s
City for Conquest
(40) and served his time as a bystander or pal in three Raoul Walsh films—
High Sierra
(41),
They Died With Their Boots On
(41), and
Desperate Journey
(43)—as well as being a member of Hawks’s idyllic
Air Force
(43), before graduating to larger parts:
Cheyenne
(47, Walsh); the father in Ted Tetzlaff’s
The Window
(49); the suspect in Kazan’s
Boomerang
(47); the brother in Irving Rapper’s
The Glass Menagerie
(50);
The Red Mountain
(51, William Dieterle); the blinded soldier in
Bright Victory
(52, Mark Robson).

As with many others, Kennedy’s best work was done in a comparatively brief spell: the vengeful hero in Fritz Lang’s
Rancho Notorious
(52); the treacherous ally in
Bend of the River
(52, Anthony Mann); the headstrong husband in Nicholas Ray’s
The Lusty Men
(52); the gunrunning foreman for Mann again in
The Man from Laramie
(55); the hypocritical brother in
Some Came Running
(58, Vincente Minnelli); perhaps his best but least-known part, as the central figure in Edgar G. Ulmer’s
The Naked Dawn
(54). In these few years, without ever becoming a star, Kennedy’s was one of the most interesting and ambivalent faces on the screen.

He worked hard later, but never with the same impact. In fact, his most consistent role was that of a skeptical outsider, observing but hardly participating in events:
Elmer Gantry
(60, Richard Brooks);
Barabbas
(62, Richard Fleischer);
Lawrence of Arabia
(62, David Lean);
Cheyenne Autumn
(64, John Ford); and
Nevada Smith
(66, Henry Hathaway). His best later parts are in
Monday’s Child
(66, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson), as the drunk in
Shark
(68, Samuel Fuller), the father in David Miller’s
Hail, Hero!
(69), in
My Old Man’s Place
(71, Edwin Sherin), and as a Mafia boss in
Baciamo le Mani
(72, Vittorio Schiraldi). He was a bishop in
The Antichrist
(74, Alberto de Martino) and a priest in
The Sentinel
(76, Michael Winner).

He made some films in Italy and then appeared in
Signs of Life
(89, John David Coles) as a Maine boat-builder.

He had been nominated once as best actor—
Bright Victory
—and four times for supporting actor:
Champion
(49, Robson);
Trial
(55, Robson);
Peyton Place
(57, Robson); and
Some Came Running
. He never won. Yet he could easily have had victory with
The Lusty Men, The Man from Laramie
, or
The Naked Dawn
. And he made the most of the promising situation in
Impulse
(55, Cy Endfield), before the script went wild.

Joseph P. Kennedy
(1888–1969), b. Boston, Massachusetts
The Kennedy story became an American movie in 1960, I suppose. At that moment, it seemed possible for an American family to accept a position that is usually reliant on inheritance or tradition. Now that Edward Kennedy is dead, the movie may be over—but it’s a large family, and we only need another two or three to feel the script in their hands for the movie to break into motion again. Could that really happen? Or is it possible that the Kennedys are by now an exhausted or exposed genre? After all, JFK got through on being a star—and, alas, we have to admit that stardom hardly functions any longer.

Fifty years later, Jack would be disgraced. We know that now, we nod and smile, but Jack slips through the net—his women are just a phantom chorus, not the raucous accusers who might have brought him down. So Jack fucked around like someone living the dream, and we dream on for him, permitting his indulgence. His head was shot off but his smile still hangs in the air. And Jack bedded movie stars (and others) because he knew his father had done the same, as a matter of course.

Of course, Joe Kennedy, the father, went further—yet so much less far, too. He fucked business acquaintances because for about five years he went into the picture business—to make money. He bought the Film Booking Office of America and he then assisted in the merger that made RKO Radio Pictures. His Hollywood biographer, Cari Beauchamp, estimates that he banked around $15 million in Hollywood and then used these funds to pay for the presidential campaign that he had to reject for himself, and that was subsequently lost to the oldest son, Joe, because of his death in the war, and that then fell to Jack—who always had the cocksure smile of a gambler or a man trying to hide how much his back was hurting.

Joe was tough, raw, direct, competitive—Beauchamp claims that he killed the movie cowboy career of Fred Thomson to boost that of Tom Mix. I think the facts and motive are unclear, but I suspect Joe Kennedy would have done it if it had seemed the fiscally smart thing to do. Yet it has to be said that this ruthless careerist then fell in love and sex with Gloria Swanson, had a flagrant affair with her, and tried to make
Queen Kelly
for and with her. He was so blinded by love that he chose Erich von Stroheim to direct
Queen Kelly
—an eventual guarantee of his own frustration and of the historical aftermath (the way Swanson and Stroheim, under the cover of names like Norma Desmond and Max von Mayerling, live on
Sunset Blvd
. running fragments of their old ruined movie).

I don’t think Joe had the humor to get that joke, or even to see that his son—his instrument—had become a character. But Jack knew. That’s the curl of his smile, the sweet glow on a face when the mind is in its orgy, the process we call sinema.

Deborah Kerr
(Deborah Jane Kerr-Trimmer) (1921–2007), b. Helensburgh, Scotland
The story goes that the turning point of Deborah Kerr’s career came when she was cast, against all expectation, and after Joan Crawford had been fussy, as the lusting wife in
From Here to Eternity
(53, Fred Zinnemann). This meant an energetic roll on the beach with Burt Lancaster, but it still left a rather more restrained woman than James Jones had intended. She also suggested that the American army in Honolulu was incongruously comforted by memsahibs. Deborah Kerr was then, has always been, and still is true blue.

Educated at Bristol and then a debutante on the London stage, her first film was Michael Powell’s
Contraband
(40). She worked in England throughout the war, as an ingenue, a heroine, a chip off the old block, and finally in devotional parts:
Major Barbara
(41, Gabriel Pascal);
Love on the Dole
(41, John Baxter);
Penn of Pennsylvania
(41) and
Hatter’s Castle
(41) for Lance Comfort;
The Day Will Come
(42, Harold French); very good as the recurring redhead in
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
(43, for Powell and Emeric Pressburger); with Robert Donat in
Perfect Strangers
(45, Alexander Korda); Frank Launder’s
I See a Dark Stranger
(46); a nun in Powell’s
Black Narcissus
(46).

She was then invited to America by MGM where she appeared in Jack Conway’s
The Hucksters
(47) (MGM’s campaign: “Deborah Kerr. It rhymes with star.”) and Victor Saville’s
If Winter Comes
(47). She was resolutely ladylike, and from Cukor’s
Edward, My Son
(49) she drifted into ever less interesting parts: the female object in
King Solomon’s Mines
(50, Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton); a glowing Christian in
Quo Vadis?
(51, Mervyn Le Roy); in Charles Vidor’s
Thunder in the East
(52); as Princess Flavia in
The Prisoner of Zenda
(52, Richard Thorpe). It was a sign of trouble that she so seldom worked with American actors, as if her gentility had frozen real company.

After
Dream Wife
(52, Sidney Sheldon) she spoke up well as Portia in Mankiewicz’s
Julius Caesar
(53). Then came
From Here to Eternity
(53), which revived her career, even if it only gave her more need to be pleasant in the future. She was in George Sidney’s
Young Bess
(53), as support for Jean Simmons; and once more self-sacrificing in Dmytryk’s
The End of the Affair
(55). She became a fixture when she whistled a happy tune as the governess in Walter Lang’s
The King and I
(56). Regality survived a sordid encounter with William Holden in
The Proud and the Profane
(56, George Seaton); the considerate offering of herself to John Kerr along with
Tea and Sympathy
(56, Vincente Minnelli)—she had starred in the stage version; and a return to nun’s habit, alone on a desert island with Robert Mitchum, in
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison
(57, John Huston).

She was a little more credible in McCarey’s
An Affair to Remember
(57); gauche being gauche in
Separate Tables
(58, Delbert Mann); but very good in Preminger’s
Bonjour Tristesse
(58), in which her niceness is actually probed and disturbed; and in Zinnemann’s
The Sundowners
(60). After that, she failed in the demanding parts of
The Innocents
(61, Jack Clayton) and
The Arrangement
(69, Elia Kazan), and continued to make soothing noises in King’s
Beloved Infidel
(59),
The Chalk Garden
(63, Ronald Neame), Huston’s
Night of the Iguana
(64), and Frankenheimer’s
The Gypsy Moths
(69).

There was a period of retirement, after which she made
A Song at Twilight
(81, Cedric Messina); in the old Elsa Lanchester role, with Ralph Richardson in a TV
Witness for the Prosecution
(82, Alan Gibson); very good in
The Assam Garden
(85, Mary McMurray); with Robert Mitchum again in
Reunion at Fairborough
(85, Herbert Wise); and
Hold the Dream
(86, Don Sharp).

In 1994, she was the most touching part of the Oscars evening, receiving an honorary award to make up for six unrewarded nominations:
Edward, My Son; From Here to Eternity; The King and I; Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison; Separate Tables;
and
The Sundowners
.

Irvin Kershner
(Irvin Kerschner), b. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1923
1958:
Stake Out on Dope Street
. 1959:
The Young Captives
. 1961:
The Hoodlum Priest
. 1963:
A Face in the Rain
. 1964:
The Luck of Ginger Coffey
. 1966:
A Fine Madness
. 1967:
The Flim Flam Man/One Born Every Minute
. 1970:
Loving
. 1972:
Up the Sandbox
. 1974:
S*P*Y*S
. 1976:
Raid on Entebbe; The Return of a Man Called Horse
. 1978:
Eyes of Laura Mars
. 1980:
The Empire Strikes Back
. 1983:
Never Say Never Again
. 1990:
Robocop 2
. 1993:
SeaQuest DSV
(TV) (codirected with Jonathan Brandis).