John Kerr (actor)

John Kerr
Born	November 15, 1931(1931-11-15) New York, New York, USA (age 80)
Occupation	Actor/Lawyer
Years active	1953–Present
Spouse	Priscilla Smith Barbara Chu

John Kerr is an American actor from a family rooted in British and Broadway stage, and a lawyer.

Early life

Kerr's parents, Geoffrey Kerr and June Walker, were both stage and film actors, and his grandfather was Frederick Kerr, a famed British trans-Atlantic character actor in the period 1880–1930; John developed an early interest in following their footsteps. He grew up in the New York City area, and went to Phillips Exeter Academy in New England; after college, he worked at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, and in summer stock.

Stage career

He made his Broadway debut in 1953 in Mary Coyle Chase's Bernardine, a high-school comedy for which he won a Theatre World Award. In 1955, he received considerable critical acclaim as a troubled college student in Robert Anderson's play Tea and Sympathy. He won a Tony Award for his performance, and he starred in the film version the following year.

Film & television career

Kerr's first acting role was in 1954 on NBC's Justice as a basketball player who believes that gamblers have ruined his success on the court. His mother appeared with him on the series, which focuses on the cases of attorneys with the Legal Aid Society of New York.

He co-starred with Leslie Caron in Gaby (1956), the third remake of Waterloo Bridge, which, in its 1931 version, featured John's grandfather Frederick Kerr. John Kerr starred with Deborah Kerr in "Tea and Sympathy" playing Tom Lee, a sensitive boy of 17 whose lack of interest in the "manly" pursuits of sports, mountain climbing and girls labels him "sister-boy" at the college he is attending. Head master Bill Reynold's wife Laura sees Tom's suffering at the hands of his school mates (and her husband), and tries to help him find himself. John Kerr had a major role in the film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific (1958), playing Lt. Joe Cable, the newly-arrived soldier about to be sent on a dangerous spy mission. In The Crowded Sky (1960), Kerr played a pilot who helps the Captain (Dana Andrews) steer a crippled airliner back to earth. His only other notable film appearance was in Roger Corman's The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), co-starring with Vincent Price and Barbara Steele.

In 1965, Kerr guest starred on NBC's The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. He had a regular role on the ABC-TV primetime TV series, Peyton Place, playing District Attorney John Fowler during the 1965-66 season. In 1964-65 he appeared as guest star on several episodes of Twelve O'Clock High. During the 1970s, Kerr had a recurring role as prosecutor Gerald O'Brien on the Quinn Martin television series The Streets of San Francisco. His last appearance as an actor was in 1986, in a minor role in The Park Is Mine, a made-for-TV movie starring Tommy Lee Jones.

Law career

Around 1966-67, Kerr took an interest in film directing, and worked as an apprentice with Leo Penn, who was then directing episodes of the Ben Gazzara television series Run for Your Life — but Kerr was quickly disenchanted by the mundane aspects of the work, and applied to and was accepted at UCLA Law School. He graduated law school, and passed the California bar in 1970. He since pursued a full-time career as a Beverly Hills lawyer, but still accepted occasional small roles in a variety of television productions over the years.

Personal life

He met Priscilla Smith while taking a class in Serbo-Croatian language and literature at Harvard; they were married December 28, 1952, and divorced in 1972. He married Barbara Chu in 1979. Kerr has three children (a son and two daughters) by his first marriage, and two stepchildren by his second.

External links

• John Kerr at the Internet Movie Database
• John Kerr (actor) at the Internet Broadway Database
• John Kerr (actor) at the Internet Off-Broadway Database