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But she's the beloved lead of two of my very VERY favorite films in the world, so I feel a strange loss in any case, and I'd feel remiss in not at least suggesting that if you haven't seen either of these great films, that you do check them out.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, written, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, features Kerr in her 6th or 7th film, the one that made her a real star. She plays three roles in three time periods, women close to the main character, Clive Wynne-Candy, a slow but basically well-meaning military man, as the film spans 40 years of his life and army career. Above and below she is Edith Hunter, and English governess in Berlin who seeks Clive Candy's help in combatting anti-English propaganda in Germany during the Boer War.

Powell, as he writes in his two autobiographies, A Life in Movies and Million Dollar Movie, was quite in love with Kerr, and it shows in every frame she's in -- even if, as you can hear in his excellent commentary on the Criterion DVD, he took a perverse pleasure in dressing her in a horrible collection of period hats. I believe he says of this one below that he can imagine her taking off from a Heathrow runway in it:

And then there's another Technicolor masterpiece from Powell & Pressburger ("The Archers"):

Kerr plays Sister Clodagh, it's a story of nuns setting up a mission in the Himalayas, it's amazingly erotic for a 1947 film, it's one of the most beautiful color movies ever shot, and if you haven't seen it, I wouldn't want to say more. See it.

Looking over her filmography again, I see a lot of films I've never seen and probably will never see, but for Edith Hunter, Barbara Wynne, Angela "Johnny" Cannon, and Sister Clodagh (and, maybe, just a little bit, for her turn in the original Casino Royale), she'll always have a place in my heart.