The King and I (1956 film) The King and I (1956 film) The King and I is a 1956 American musical film made by 20th Century Fox, directed by Walter Lang and produced by Charles Brackett and Darryl F. Zanuck. The screenplay by Ernest Lehman is based on the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II musical "The King and I", based in turn on the novel "Anna and the King of Siam" by Margaret Landon. That novel in turn was based on memoirs written by Anna Leonowens, who became school teacher to the children of King Mongkut of Siam in the early 1860s. Leonowens' stories were
Deborah Kerr 1950 adventure film "King Solomon's Mines", shot on location in Africa with Stewart Granger and Richard Carlson. This was immediately followed by her appearance in the religious epic "Quo Vadis?" (1951), shot at Cinecittà in Rome, in which she played the indomitable Lygia, a first-century Christian. She then played Princess Flavia in a remake of "The Prisoner of Zenda" (1952). In 1953, Kerr "showed her theatrical mettle" as Portia in Joseph Mankiewicz's "Julius Caesar". She then departed from typecasting with a performance that brought out her sensuality, as "Karen Holmes", the embittered military wife in Fred Zinnemann's "From Here to