Early Life
Kerr was born Deborah Jane Trimmer in a private nursing home (hospital) in Glasgow, the only daughter of Kathleen Rose (née Smale) and Capt. Arthur Charles Trimmer, a World War I veteran who lost a leg at the Somme, and later became a naval architect and civil engineer. Directly after her birth she spent the first three years of her life in the nearby town of Helensburgh, where her parents lived with Deborah's grandparents in a house on West King Street. Kerr had a younger brother, Edmund (a.k.a. Teddy), who became a journalist and died in a "road-rage" incident in 2004.
Kerr was educated at the independent Northumberland House School in the Henleaze area of Bristol in England (the school was demolished in 1937, when Kerr was only 16 years old), and at Rossholme School in Weston-super-Mare.
Kerr originally trained as a ballet dancer, first appearing on stage at Sadler's Wells in 1938. After changing careers, she soon found success as an actress. Her first acting teacher was her aunt, Phyllis Smale, who ran the Hicks-Smale Drama School in Bristol.
She adopted the name Deborah Kerr on becoming a film actress - "Kerr" was a family name, supposedly that of the maternal grandmother of her grandfather Arthur Kerr Trimmer.
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