Word: actressing
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...didn't have to be a talent scout to recognize that Kerr was the perfect package of a quality actress. Her large blue eyes could glare in disapproval or moisten dewily in the surrender to love. Her mouth expressed primness or sensuality, as needed; and in many films it relaxed into the self-depreciating smile of a woman who can't believe people when they say she's gorgeous - someone for whom every conquest is a new surprise. Whether her film characters had an unapproachable (and thus enticing) air or bore the unspoiled stamp of the dream girl next door...
...ladylike was Kerr (pronounced "car")? Three times the New York Film Critics' Circle named her best actress prize, and two of those awards came for playing nuns, in Black Narcissus in 1947 and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison a decade later. (The third was as the wife of sheepherder Robert Mitchum in the 1960 The Sundowners.) How congenial? In 1956 she was given a Hollywood bauble called the Golden Apple Award as Most Cooperative Actress...
...Edward, My Son; From Here to Eternity; The King and I; Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison; Separate Tables and The Sundowners. But Kerr never took home a competitive statuette. In 1994, the Academy voted her a lifetime achievement award, proclaiming her "an artist of impeccable grace and beauty, a dedicated actress whose motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and elegance...
...limo without exposing her crotch. But that notion of refinement was a fiction too. It happened to be the prevailing tone of A-list movies of the 40s that lingered through the 50s. Kerr was not some elevated being who allowed herself to be photographed. She was an actress, convincingly playing these roles. And though her career was never marked by scandal, off-camera she could be as earthy as the next mid-century star. "People always think I'm the epitome of the English gentlewoman," she told the Chicago Tribune after she retired, "which just goes to show that...
...pale skin. For her three Colonel Blimp characters she had worn it in different shades and styles, from upswept scarlet to sensible russet. She was a natural for Hollywood in the postwar years, when more movies were made in Technicolor, and red was the fashionable tint for an actress. Yet in her most famous film role - anyway, film scene - she went platinum blond...