While this is only tangentially Tudor-related, Foose reminded me in comments to the Elizabeth open thread that I wanted to comment on the passing of Deborah Kerr. (And yes, I’ll do some more “open threads” in the future on some other topics, since it was kind of fun to read other people’s thoughts on “The Golden Age”).
I first really got into the Tudors when I was about 14 years old, which was also about the time that I really got hooked on watching old movies. I think it was around this time that American Movie Classics and channels like that starting popping up and I fell in love with some of the old movies (not to mention forming crushes on some of the actors, in particular Cary Grant and Yul Brynner). So, of course, I started seeking out old historical movies, and I’m pretty sure the first Tudor one I watched was “Young Bess” (1953). Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger (who were married to one another at the time) star as the young Elizabeth and Thomas Seymour, Charles Laughton reprises his role from “The Private Life of Henry VIII” (1933) as the big king himself and Deborah Kerr played Katherine Parr. Interestingly, the boy who played Edward VI in “Young Bess” would go on to play the son of Kerr’s character in “The King and I” (one of my all-time favorite movies).
When the news came out the Deborah Kerr had died, the coverage mostly mentioned the famous kiss on the beach in “From Here to Eternity” and her roles in “The King and I” and “An Affair to Remember”, but I also thought of her in the role I first saw her – Queen Katherine Parr in “Young Bess”.
Deborah Kerr was such a class act. I adored her. 🙁
I think her being a class act was what made her effective as Katherine Parr, another class act. My favorite sequence in Young Bess, however, is when the child Elizabeth is repeatedly dragged back to court to meet a new mother, encountering first an off-screen comic German (I think this was just after World War II and there was some anti-German humor going on there) as Anne of Cleves, and then the beautiful Catherine Howard, with Henry fondly and possessively pinching her neck…
There’s also the great scene when Henry is dying, with his children grouped dutifully at the foot of the bed, and he calls them all sheep; he calls poor Mary the “crazy sheep” (and admittedly the actress they got had a tinge of mania), and Edward the “lost sheep” and then his unloved Elizabeth steps forward and snarls, “I’m the black sheep!” It was hilarious.