The South West Film and Television Archive (SWFTA) is the regional film archive for the South West of England. Established in 1993, SWFTA's core collection comprises of the combined programme libraries of Westward Television and TSW (Television South West). The archive also cares for a significant number of donated film collections, both amateur and professional, dating back to the early 1900s.
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Interview with Deborah Kerr
Deborah Kerr explains the masoschism associated with theatrical performance.
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Overview
From nun to sex symbol Scottish born Deborah Kerr CBE starred in over 45 films in as many years. Here the actor is interviewed after suffering from stage fright during a theatre performance of Emlyn William’s The Corn Is Green. She portrays Miss Moffat, a strong-willed teacher who set up a school in a Welsh mining village and finds talent in one of her pupils. She is recognised as one of the UK’s foremost Hollywood film stars and respected theatre actors.
Kerr received 6 Academy nominations for Best Actress and in 1994 was awarded a lifetime achievement award. In 1961 Elizabeth Taylor beat her to the Oscar for Butterfield 8 and Kerr’s role as a sheepdrover’s wife in Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners was overlooked. Kerr attended Ninette de Valois’s Sadler’s Wells Ballet School and at 20 she was cast in a Major Barbara (1941). She portrayed the English governess next to Yul Brynner in The King and I (1956) and the adulterous wife in From Here To Eternity (1953) with its steamy beach scene with Burt Lancaster and in Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947) and Heaven Knows, Mr Allison (1957) she played a nun. She described theatre as masochistic madness.
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