Deborah Kerr provided the cinema with memorable studies in English gentility. Blessed with a natural beauty that faded little over the years, she was a star before she was 21, quickly snapped up by Hollywood, where for a couple of decades she specialised in ladylike roles.

She was a dedicated actress who projected a cool reserve and stoic nobility while often hinting at a passion and insecurity beneath the surface which gave her playing an extra edge. These qualities often led her to be cast as spinsters, widows, governesses and nuns, women who had suffered or chosen to sacrifice themselves to others. Of her several screen governesses, the best known and most popular was Mrs Anna Leonowens in The King and I.

But she could successfully step outside her normal range, as she demonstrated playing the sexually frustrated army wife in From Here to Eternity, creating in the process the screen's most famous clinch — on the beach with Burt Lancaster. It was one of six performances for which she gained Oscar nominations, and though she never won she did receive an honorary Academy Award in 1994.

Deborah Kerr was born Deborah Kerr Trimmer near Glasgow, of English parents. Her father was a civil engineer. Educated at a boarding school, Northumberland House, Clifton, Bristol, she trained as a dancer at her aunt's drama school in Bristol and won a scholarship to Sadler's Wells, making her London debut at 17 among the corps de ballet in Prometheus.

But she soon decided that she was more interested in acting than dancing. She began her stage career with walk-on parts in Shakespeare at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park and later went into repertory at the Oxford Playhouse.

Her first film part, in the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger thriller Contraband (1940), was edited out, but she launched her screen career strongly in the following year playing the Salvation Army girl, Jenny Hill, in Major Barbara.

In her next film she played the doughty heroine of Walter Greenwood's Depression drama, Love on the Dole (1940), and in 1943 Powell and Pressburger atoned by giving her the plum triple role in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, after their original choice, Wendy Hiller, withdrew because of pregnancy.

After playing the shy Wren officer in Alexander Korda's Perfect Strangers (1944) and an Irish girl spying for the Germans in I See a Dark Stranger (1945), Kerr was back with Powell and Pressburger in their flamboyant, sexually charged Black Narcissus (1946), as the head of the Himalayan convent where passions run amok.

By now she was under contract to MGM and on her way to Hollywood. She began by playing the lead opposite Clark Gable in The Hucksters (1947) and in 1949 received the first of her Oscar nominations as Spencer Tracy's wife driven to drink in Edward My Son. After getting stuck in costume adventures, her career revived with a small but telling role as Portia in MGM's Julius Caesar (1952) and took a new turn when she was cast against type in From Here to Eternity (1953), a study of ennui, insubordination and sexual infidelity in a Honolulu army camp on the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. With her auburn hair dyed blonde, she looked more like Marilyn Monroe than an English rose, and her amorous roll on the beach with Lancaster caused a sensation. In 1953 she appeared on Broadway in Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, a play which aroused controversy because of its homosexual theme. She repeated her role of the schoolmaster's wife who seduces a pupil in the bowdlerised film version. In complete contrast was her governess to the King of Siam (Yul Brynner) in The King and I, one of the most successful screen musicals of the 1950s. The singing voice was partly her own and partly dubbed by Marni Nixon.

Kerr's precise British style often made an effective contrast with the more low-key playing of American actors such as Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum. She first appeared with Mitchum in John Huston's Heaven Knows Mr Allison (1957), a virtual two-hander about a nun and a Marine thrown together on a desert island. Kerr and Mitchum also starred in The Sundowners (1961), as a husband and wife travelling the Australian outback.

In 1961 she returned to Britain to play another Victorian governess in The Innocents, a stylish reworking of Henry James's ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, and was yet another governess, Miss Madrigal, in The Chalk Garden (1964).

She ended the 1960s playing the hectoring wife of the tormented advertising executive (Kirk Douglas) in Elia Kazan's The Arrangement (1969) but then virtually retired from the screen, declaring that she was no longer being offered parts she wanted.

Apart from Tea and Sympathy (1953) she had not worked in the theatre since 1943 when she played opposite Edith Evans in Shaw's Heartbreak House. But during the 1970s and 1980s she was seen regularly on the New York and London stage.

In 1972 she starred in The Day After the Fair, based on a Thomas Hardy story, in the West End, and later took the play to the United States and Australia. Other London plays were Shaw's Candida (1977) and Peter Ustinov's Overheard (1981). In New York she played in Edward Albee's Seascape and in Los Angeles she was Mary Tyrone, opposite Charlton Heston, in Eugene O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey into Night.

During the opening night of Emlyn Williams's The Corn is Green in Bath in 1985 she suffered stage fright and as she struggled to remember her lines some members of the audience walked out.

After a gap of 16 years she returned to the cinema with a sensitive performance as the widow coming to terms with her past in The Assam Garden. On television she played Barbara Taylor Bradford's servant girl turned tycoon in A Woman of Substance and starred with Robert Mitchum in a Second World War romance, Reunion at Fairborough. She was appointed CBE in 1998.

Her marriage in 1945 to Squadron Leader Anthony Bartley, of which there were two daughters, was dissolved in 1959. In the following year she married the novelist and screenwriter Peter Viertel. He and her daughters survive her.

Deborah Kerr, CBE, actress, was born on September 30, 1921. She died on October 16, 2007, aged 86