Deborah Kerr, the Scottish actress who rolled in the surf with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity and charmed Yul Brynner’s Siamese monarch in the King and I, has died at 86.

She was “an artist of impeccable grace and beauty, a dedicated actress whose motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and elegance”, according to the citation for the honorary Academy Award that she won in 1994.

She died on Tuesday in Suffolk, her agent said. “Her family was with her at the time. She had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for some time and had just had her 86th birthday. She just slipped away.”

Francesca Schrapnel, Kerr’s daughter, added: “Although she had many great roles over the years, she didn’t necessarily have a favourite herself. The family, I think, loved her best in The Sundowners opposite Robert Mitchum, a lovely film set in the Australian outback.”

In a varied screen career that spanned 45 years Kerr established herself as one of the last great stars of Hollywood’s golden era. She was nominated for an Oscar six times, although she never won.

For much of her early career her image was that of a slightly prim English rose, thanks in part to her genteel manner and a ramrod posture honed during her training as a ballet dancer.

However, her fiery performance in From Here to Eternity (1953), playing against type as the adulterous wife of an army officer at the time of Pearl Harbor, demolished that perception. The illicit clinch she shared with Lancaster as the waves broke around them on a beach in Hawaii caused a sensation at the time and is still regularly voted among cinema’s most memorable scenes.

Kerr went on to play a string of more passionate parts on screen and stage before she retired to Switzerland and Spain with her second husband, the writer Peter Viertel. She returned to England when her illness worsened.

As well as suffering from Parkinson’s disease, she was devastated in 2004 when her 78-year-old brother Ed-mund died after a road-rage attack in Birmingham.

Kerr was born at Helensburgh in 1921, the daughter of a civil engineer who developed tuberculosis and died after being gassed in the First World War.

Her mother held the family together after his death and they moved to Bristol, where Kerr studied drama. After war broke out in 1939 she worked in an RAF canteen. Her first significant role was in a screen adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara in 1941 and, after breakthrough performances in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (in which she played three parts) and Black Narcissus, she moved to America.

She arrived in Hollywood with a £750-a-week contract with MGM and was soon described as the First Lady of Hollywood. Later she was to say: “If you believed all that great star rubbish the studios used to put out, God help you.”

The comedian Joey Bishop, the last surviving member of the “Rat Pack” led by Frank Sinatra, has died, aged 89. He died on Wednesday at his home in California.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• Oscars

• Cannes

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette