He also was the writer, lyricist, and/or director of several Broadway plays and musicals as well as the author of several books, generally on the subject of theater and cinema.

[6] He was portrayed pseudonymously by David Niven in the 1960 film Please Don't Eat the Daisies, based on Jean Kerr's best-selling collection of humorous essays.

Kerr was one of the harshest New York theatre critics of his era, giving the fewest favorable reviews.

Notoriously he is credited with one of the world's shortest reviews, "Me no Leica" for John Van Druten's I Am a Camera in the New York Herald Tribune, December 31, 1951.

About Sondheim's Company, Kerr wrote that it was too cold, cynical and distant for his taste, though he "admitted to admiring large parts of the show.

The effort to bind it up inhibits the crackling, open-ended, restlessly varied surges of sound he devised with such distinction for Company.

"[11] He praised A Little Night Music, writing that "The score is a gift, the ladies are delightful, and producer Harold Prince has staged the moody meetings with easy skill.

The design of the unending chase is so firm, the performers are so secure in their climbing and tumbling...that we are able to join the journey and still see it with the detachment that Voltaire prescribes.

opera], The Most Happy Fella he wrote: "the evening at the Imperial is finally heavy with its own inventiveness, weighted down with the variety and fulsomeness of a genuinely creative appetite.