| Activity | 1944-present.
Born in Crouch Hill, London, England, Jean Simmons began acting at the age of 14. During the war the Simmons family had been evacuated to Winscombe in Somerset - her father, a physical education teacher (who had represented Great Britain in the 1912 Summer Olympics), taught briefly at Sidcot School, - and sometime during this period she followed her older sister on to the village stage and sang songs like ' Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow Wow'. Returning to London and just enrolled at the Aida Foster School of Dance she was talent spotted by the director Val Guest who cast her in the Margaret Lockwood vehicle Give us the Moon. Prior to moving to Hollywood, she distinguished herself in such roles as the young Estella in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946) and Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet in 1948. It was the experience of working on ' Great Expectations' that caused her to pursue an acting career more seriously : ' I thought acting was just a lark, meeting all those exciting movie stars, and getting £5 a day which was lovely because we needed the money. But I figured I'd just go off and get married and have children like my mother. It was working with David Lean that convinced me to go on.' Playing Ophelia in Olivier's Hamlet made her a star though she was already well known for her work in other British films. Olivier offered her the chance to work and study at the Bristol Old Vic, advising her to play anything they threw at her to get experience, but it was not to be. She was under contract to the Rank Organisation. In 1950 Britain lost their young star to America - and Rank sold her to Howard Hughes who then owned RKO studios.
In 1950, she married the English actor Stewart Granger, with whom she appeared in several films, successfully making the transition to Hollywood. She made four films for Howard Hughes, including Angel Face directed by Otto Preminger. In 1953 she made The Actress, starring alongside Spencer Tracy - a film that is one of her personal favourites. Among her best-known leading roles are The Robe (1953) The Egyptian (1954), Guys and Dolls (1955), The Big Country (1958), Elmer Gantry (1960) (directed by her second husband, Richard Brooks), Spartacus (1960), and The Happy Ending, again directed by Brooks and for which she received her second Oscar nomination.
By the 1970s, Simmons turned her focus to stage and television acting. She toured the United States in the well-reviewed A Little Night Music, then took the show to London, and thus originated the role of Desirée Armfeldt on the West End[4] . Doing the show for three years, she said she never tired of Stephen Sondheim's music; ' No matter how tired or 'off ' you felt, the music would just pick you up.' For her appearance in the mini-series The Thorn Birds, she won an Emmy Award. In 1985 and 1986 she appeared in North & South. In 1988 she starred in The Dawning with Anthony Hopkins and Hugh Grant and in 1989 she again starred in a miniseries, this time a version of Great Expectations, in which she played the role of Miss Havisham, Estella's adoptive mother. Simmons made a late career appearance in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Drumhead" as a witch-hunt inspiring investigator named Admiral Nora Satie. |