not bad, but not good either. pretty dryly written, just kinda plodding along listing her filmography with a few anecdotes and biographical details. Deborah portrays some of my favorite female characters in film, and she's famously the master of playing sexually repressed women (shout out https://letterboxd.com/moreviolinsontv/list/deborah-kerr-by-how-repressed-she-is/). Sometimes she's gay, sometimes her husband's gay, sometimes she's a nun, sometimes she's an adulteress, sometimes he's the king of Siam, some combination of the above, etc. But even though as the book states, she selected most of her roles herself and wanted to play women who were real (and "wicked"!), but there's not much about her acting or what drew her to the role, nor much analysis on the film itself. there's a glimpse of her personal beliefs on womanhood and femininity (along the lines of she believes women should be feminine, stay soft and clean, and let men take the drivers seat), but the author makes no efforts into thinking about her acting through these lens. There is also not much written about her religious beliefs considering she's played a nun like three times.

for instance, Black Narcissus, probably one of her most major roles barely mentions how her repressed nun character is a blueprint for many of her future roles, and doesn't touch on the lesbian implications of it all! in Vacation from Marriage/Perfect Strangers she shares a bed with Glynis Johns(!) who is jealous of her husband! The Innocents, the famously ambiguous horror films, gets similar treatment, though it does have a quote from her talking about her approach to Miss Gidden's being sexually tormented but not much more on that. It is said that she has long wanted to play the role but doesn't really explore why. which is a shame because I have always found her governess character in The Innocents the most fascinating of her repressed woman roles because (to me) there is an element of her sexual thoughts/desires towards children, a rare thing in classic Hollywood films let alone from a woman, and how Christian and conservative fervor about "protecting children", "saving children" not only can obfuscate child abuse but encourage it, something I think we can see is still relevant today. But rather there is just some anecdotes about working with Jack Clayton, how Cary Grant wanted to be in it, and the hoop skirts and crinoline hurt her back. What did Deborah, or the biographer, think of the controversial, which the studio head begged for two weeks to try to remove it, ending? There's no such thing as a truly unbiased biography, so I don't necessarily mind when a biographer voices his thoughts or interpretations of his subject and movies, and in fact I think it can push it from being just an extended Wikipedia article to an interesting read. Unfortunately, I felt there was such a distance between the writer and the subject that it just felt like the former.