Philip French pays tribute to the Rank Organisation starlet who went on to become one of Hollywood's most luminous actresses
ean Simmons, who has died at the age of 80 of lung cancer in Santa Monica, California, was among the finest, most beautiful British movie actresses of the postwar years. She was one of only two from that great 1940s flourishing of our native industry under J Arthur Rank to become a major star in Hollywood; the other was Deborah Kerr, with whom she twice appeared.
Born in 1929, the daughter of a gym teacher who had represented Britain in the 1912 Olympics, she grew up in Cricklewood, north London, of which she once disloyally remarked: "No Cricklewood girl would ever admit to being from there." She got a deal of work as a child actress, without becoming a child star (her most memorable early appearance is singing at a forces concert in the morale-building wartime favourite The Way to the Stars), then found fame as a teenager.
She is often spoken of as a demure English rose, and indeed a 2004 American TV documentary was called Jean Simmons: Rose of England, and she crossed the Atlantic at a time when British actresses were not required to adopt American accents. But the early roles that established her reputation were dangerously troubled figures in postwar British classics: Estella, the wilful agent of the destructive Miss Havisham in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946); the eastern temptress in the Himalayan convent in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947); and Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948).
In his review of Hamlet, America's greatest film critic of the time, James Agee, said she was "the only person in the picture who gives every one of her lines the bloom of poetry and the immediacy of ordinary life". She received the first of her Oscar nominations for the part, though she had never read or seen a Shakespeare play before, and Olivier's suggestion that she go to drama school was vetoed by the Rank Organisation. Rank then sold her contract to Howard Hughes, and she went to Hollywood in 1950 with her husband, Stewart Granger, then a major star and 16 years her senior, whom she had worked with on the romantic comedy Adam and Evelyne (1949).
The capricious Hughes ill-used her talent. She flourished, however, as soon as she broke free of him, becoming for more than a decade one of the dominant performers in an industry where the studio system was in decline. The first great part was playing the Roman patrician converted to Christianity in the widescreen epic The Robe (1953), the first feature made in CinemaScope. In it she acted opposite Richard Burton, and at different times she co-starred with Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy (she called her first child Tracy Granger), Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster and Cary Grant, and was directed by Otto Preminger, George Cukor, Joseph L Mankiewicz, William Wyler, Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Donen and her second husband, Richard Brooks (with whom she had a daughter named Kate after Katharine Hepburn).
Simmons was impressive in her first Hollywood role as a homicidal psychopath in the noir thriller Angel (made under Hughes's auspices) and in 1958 gave one of her greatest performances as an overbearing academic's wife experiencing a breakdown in Home Before Dark.
Her characteristic roles at this time were strong but never sanctimonious super ego figures, people of moral stature, as varied as the Salvation Army officer Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls (which allowed her to sing and show her delightful sense of comedy), the schoolmarm acting as a restraining influence during a Texas range war in The Big Country, the slave Verina courted by Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, and the dedicated evangelist in Elmer Gantry. There are unforgettable scenes in all these pictures.
From the mid-70s onwards, her work was mainly for television in such mini-series as The Thorn Birds and North and South, and her career came full circle when she played Miss Havisham in a television version of Great Expectations. She made a notable return to London and the stage in 1975 as Desirée Armfeldt in a West End production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, a role created on Broadway by Glynis Johns, another British expatriate and Simmons's closest friend. She was excellent, and infinitely superior to Elizabeth Taylor in the film version.
Most recently she came out of retirement to appear in a final movie in Britain, David Rocksavage's Shadows in the Sun, playing a frail, terminally ill poet determined to hang on to her family house in East Anglia, who dies shortly after watching an alfresco production of that wise play about departure and death, The Tempest. It opened last June, the same day that Spartacus was reissued, and it was a deeply moving experience to see the two performances, separated by nearly half a century, on the same day.
