The King and I (1956 film) O'Hara, who had a pleasant soprano voice, was originally cast, but Richard Rodgers did not agree to the casting. It was Yul Brynner who pressed for Deborah Kerr to play the role. Marni Nixon provided Kerr's singing for the film. Nixon and Kerr worked side-by-side in the recording studio for songs which combined speaking and singing. Nixon would also dub Kerr's singing the following year, for the film "An Affair to Remember". Donald Bogle's biography of Dorothy Dandridge claims that Dandridge was offered the role of Tuptim in partial fulfillment of her three-picture contract with 20th Century-Fox, but that Dandridge
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