Raymond Burr used to pronounce his name Stanberg Frammel.
Per Knowed Out’s quote: “Asked how to say his name, Admiral Mark Kerr told The Literary Digest, 'In Scotland the name rhymes with care. Since many of the family have come to England the pronunciation in this country rhymes with car, which we have entirely submitted to.”
For what it’s worth, I was at university (in England) with a fellow from Edinburgh named Kerr. He was a bit of a snob, and a very precise, “just-so” type: was insistent that his name was pronounced to rhyme with “car”, and was highly particular that anyone using it re himself, should pronounce it that way.
I’m a big believer in pronouncing your own name any way you like, but still. That borders on “Throat-Wobbler Mangrove” territory.
There are a bunch of stories about the name that reference a guy named Derby, pronounced ‘Darby’, bringing it all full circle back to your OP.
Some of these pronunciations are leftovers from the great vowel shift. This was a change in the pronunciation of English vowels that started in the fifteenth century and continued through the eighteenth century. Some words (like “clerk” and “derby”) kept their original pronunciations in British English. It’s possible that Deborah Kerr’s family continued to pronounce their name as it originally sounded centuries ago.
Supposedly, it goes back to England where Enroughty was the family name and Darby was their estate - something like Lord John Enroughty Earl of Darby. When some family members came to America, they lost any official connection to the estate but wanted to maintain the unofficial connection. So the family name was spelled Enroughty and pronounced Darby.
Another theory is that there was a prestigious family named Darby and some lower class person named Enroughty married into the family. The Darbys all looked down on Enroughty but he became a successful businessman and was very wealthy in his old age. He then told the Darbys that they could inherit his fortune - but only if they changed the family name to Enroughty. Wanting the money, the Darbys changed their name legally to Enroughty - but they continued to call themselves Darby.
Both of these stories are anecdotal but they indicate a recognition that there’s no connection between the spelling and the pronunciation of the name.
Hockey player Alex Pietrangelo pronounces his name pit-TRANJ-leo (I think?) His cousin is former hockey player Frank Pietrangelo, but he pronounces it Peter-ANGELO.
Hell, in my own family, some people pronounce our last name one way, some pronounce it another, and both are actually considered perfectly correct.
There are plenty of examples of English families who pronounce their names counterintuitively:
Baden-Powell – /ˈbeɪdən ˈpoʊəl/ “Baden as in maiden; Powell as in Noel” (Founder of the Scout movement)
John Donne, poet – /dʌn/ (Dunn)
Earl of Home – /ˈhjuːm/ (rhymes with fume)
Menzies – /ˈmɪŋɨs/ (Mingies)
St John (first name and surname) – /ˈsɪndʒən (Singen)
And not just English families. Mulcahy, for example, is frequently pronounced “mulCAYhy” in the US. And Costello is pronounced in the US with a stress on the middle syllable, when the usual conventions of English pronunciation would suggest the first syllable (Robinson, Barnaby, Millington, Kennedy) and the native pronunciation does indeed stress the first syllable.
Names is weird. The only “correct” pronunciation is the pronunciation used by whoever’s name it is, so far as I am concerned. The result is that lots of names have numerous different correct pronunciations.
That would have to be one hell of an up-their-own-arse aristocratic family. Possible, I suppose.
I’m an American, and I certainly was taught that “err” is not pronounced like the first syllable of “error” but to rhyme with “burr.”
But it’s a very common mistake, because it seems logical, and one distinctly remember that I made when I was young. I suppose soon the self-proclaimed “descriptivists” will decide that it is therefore actually (prescriptively) correct.
“Menzies” is a case of a Scottish name with a ȝ (yogh) substituting z for ȝ with the rise of movable type.
As I understand it, the pronunciation of the name “Kerr” is believed to have evolved over time rather than actually remaining static while the language went through vowel shifts. So the original border-raider clan didn’t pronounce it “car” that’s just a later development.
Kerr Avenue in Wilmington, NC is pronounced “car”. On this street is a self-service car wash, called The Kerr Wash, pronounced “The Car Wash”.
No, he did not, he pronounced it Will Burr. And he had this horse…
But Kirk Douglas used to pronounce his name “Issur Demsky”.