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'Ben-Hur' 1959 with Stephen Boyd and Charlton Heston: TCM's '31 Days of Oscar.' '31 Days of Oscar': 'Lawrence of Arabia' and 'Ben-Hur' are in, Paramount stars are out Today, Feb. 1, '16, Turner Classic Movies is kicking off the 21st edition of its “31 Days of Oscar.” While the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is being vociferously reviled for its “lack of diversity” – more on that appallingly myopic, self-serving, and double-standard-embracing furore in an upcoming post – TCM is celebrating nearly nine decades of the Academy Awards. That's the good news. The disappointing news is that if you're expecting to find rare Paramount, Universal, or Fox/20th Century Fox entries in the mix, you're out of luck. So, missing from the TCM schedule are, among others: Best Actress nominees Ruth Chatterton in Sarah and Son, Nancy Carroll in The Devil's Holiday, Claudette Colbert in Private Worlds. Unofficial Best Actor...

Actor who starred as the troubled pupil in Tea and Sympathy on stage and screen

The actor John Kerr, who has died aged 81, won a Tony award in his first starring role on the Broadway stage, as Tom in Tea and Sympathy in 1953, and subsequently appeared in the 1956 film version directed by Vincente Minnelli. Robert Anderson's play, in which a schoolboy "confesses" to his housemaster's wife that he might be homosexual – only to be seduced out of the notion by the sympathetic listener – was considered so controversial that it was restricted to a "members only" theatrical run in London, and Minnelli's film received an X certificate, despite modification, notably in the suggestion that the housemaster was gay.

Kerr starred as the boy, although by then he was in his 20s. Born in New York, son of the actors Geoffrey Kerr and June Walker, he had already graduated from Harvard,...

Kerr in the 1958 box-office blockbuster musical South Pacific (seen above with love interest France Nuyen) and his (few) other post-Tea and Sympathy efforts [Please check out the previous article: "The Two Kerrs in the stage and film versions of Tea and Sympathy."] Director Curtis Bernhardt's Gaby (1956) was a generally disliked remake of Waterloo Bridge, with Kerr and leading lady Leslie Caron in the old Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh roles (1940 movie version -- and even older Douglass Montgomery and Mae Clarke roles in the 1931 film version). Jeffrey Hayden's The Vintage (1957), starring Kerr and Mel Ferrer absurdly cast as Italian brothers, also failed to generate much box-office or critical interest. MGM leading lady Pier Angeli played Ferrer's love interest in the film, while the more mature and married French star Michèle Morgan (a plot element similar to that found in Tea and Sympathy) is Kerr's object of desire. (Pictured above: South Pacific cast members John Kerr and France Nuyen embracing.) Also in the mid-'50s, John Kerr...