John Kerr, 81, the stage and film actor whose credits include the movie South Pacific, the thriller The Pit and the Pendulum, and a Tony Award-winning turn in Tea and Sympathy, died Saturday of heart failure at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, Calif.
Mr. Kerr was perhaps best known for playing a sensitive prep-school student who is bullied for being a suspected homosexual in the 1953 Broadway production of Tea and Sympathy.
He went on to reprise the role in a 1956 film version.
