Between dips in the bathtub, Deborah Kerr candidly comments on her leading men, guilt feelings, complexion care, and the delicate art of playing love scenes in the sand.

The bathroom had a certain elegance, as did the two ladies occupying it. The strawberry blonde lay in the tub, soaping her knees. She was frowning. Her visitor, an older woman wearing diamonds and a black lace evening gown, walked over to a dressing table and stared at herself in the mirror.
"I'll sit down somewhere, and we'll talk," she said. The girl in the tub said, "I don't feel like talking." Black Lace glanced at her sharply. "I don't remember the exact words," she remarked, "but a psychiatrist once told me that if you have the fear of talking, it has something to do with the fear of giving - sexually, I mean . . . . Has George been giving?"
Splashes from the tub drowned out the answer. "If you're ready to blame yourself," Black Lace went on, "I know exactly what's wrong with you. It's very true, you know, it's not always the wife's fault if the husband strays. Some single men stray."
A man's voice said "Cut!" whereupon Miss Hermione Gingold adjusted her black lace and strolled out of the bathroom for a cigarette. Wardrobe women assisted Miss Deborah Kerr from the tub, and wrapped her in big towels to dry her for the next take.

Miss Kerr's costar is Gary Cooper, an actor usually seen in costumes suitable for wear around sagebrush and horses. For his role as an American businessman in London, he wears a dozen lounge and sport suits tailored on Saville Row, a departure which may cause suspense among Western fans. The story begins with a murder trial at Old Bailey, where Miss Kerr watches her husband, Cooper, testify against a business associate. The man is convicted. Then a number of incidents happen which convince Miss Kerr that she may be killed next. Suspicion points to her husband. With mounting terror, she tries to find out what sort of man she is married to.

I asked Deborah how she maintained her flawless complexion.
"Thank you, but I don't bathe in goats' milk or anything extraordinary. I'm a soap-and-water girl. I can't get make-up off my face with anything less. I have a pet soap, and the same people make a very good cleansing lotion I use afterward. Make-up tends to make one break out in spots and bumps. I don't have too much trouble with my skin, but anybody who uses screen make-up all her life finds pores becoming enlarged." She frowned. "Mine are, a little."
"This movie is in black and white," she went on, "so I wear a darker make-up base and considerably more emphasis on the eyes. If I wore this for a color film, I'd look like a giant panda."

"How do you go about learning lines?" I asked. "It's always been easy for me, thank heaven. Mostly, I do it by just reading the script over and over. I do it alone, unless it's a very long speech; then I like to have someone hear it. Someone who's quite extraordinary is Bob Mitchum. He can take a page, run his eyes down it - like this - and he knows it. He mustr have a photographic memory.
And it's not true that Gary Cooper is a man of few words. In this film, he has a great deal to say, and says it rather well. I admire his unusual stamina in this business, and I'm delighted to be in a picture with him at last. He was a childhood here of mine."
"Who's your favorite leading man?"
She smiled. "I've been so lucky. I've had them all. Oh dear - that sounds terrible! But I think I've gotten around to everybody except James Stewart and Marlon Brando."
"I came over from England to act, but it turned out all I had to do was to be high-minded, long-suffering, white-gloved, and decorative." This period ended with the job she did as a passionate siren in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY. Her love scenes in the surf with Burt Lancaster displayed a new and unfamiliar Deborah Kerr with undreamed-of emotional capacities. That film earned her one of her six best-actress Oscar nominations.

Deborah on self-control:"I'm sure it would do me no good to lose my temper. It would put me out of commission for days."