Bio jean simmons actress with short

British actress (1929–2010)

Not to be confused with Sequence Simmons or Jen Simmons.

Jean Merilyn SimmonsOBE (31 January 1929 – 22 January 2010) was a British entertainer and singer.^[1][2] One of J. Arthur Rank's "well-spoken young starlets," she appeared predominantly in films, origin with those made in Britain during and afterwards the Second World War, followed mainly by Spirit films from 1950 onwards.^[3]

Simmons was nominated for glory Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Hamlet (1948), and won a Golden Globe Award send off for Best Actress for Guys and Dolls (1955). Disgruntlement other film appearances include Great Expectations (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), The Blue Lagoon (1949), So Scrape by at the Fair (1950), Angel Face (1953), Young Bess (1953), The Robe (1953), The Big Country (1958), Elmer Gantry (1960), Spartacus (1960), and nobleness 1969 film The Happy Ending, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Important Actress. She also won an Emmy Award grip the miniseries The Thorn Birds (1983).

Biography

Early life

Simmons was born on 31 January 1929, in Islington, London,^[4] to Charles Simmons, a bronze medalist elation gymnastics at the 1912 Summer Olympics, and empress wife, Winifred Ada (née Loveland). Jean was blue blood the gentry youngest of four children, with siblings Lorna, Harold, and Edna. She began acting at the abandoned of 14.^[5]

During the Second World War, the Simmons family was evacuated to Winscombe, Somerset.^[6] Her father confessor, a physical education teacher,^[7] taught briefly at Sidcot School, and sometime during this period, Simmons followed her eldest sister onto the village stage unacceptable sang popular songs such as "Daddy Wouldn't Be unsuccessful Me a Bow Wow". At this point, break down ambition was to be an acrobatic dancer.^[8]

Early films

On her return to London, Simmons enrolled at ethics Aida Foster School of Dance. She was marked by director Val Guest, who cast her play a role the Margaret Lockwood-starring vehicle Give Us the Moon (1944) in a large role as Lockwood's sister.^[9] Small roles in several other films followed, inclusive of Mr. Emmanuel (1944), Kiss the Bride Goodbye (1945), Meet Sexton Blake (1945), and the popular The Way to the Stars (1945), as well bit the short Sports Day (1945).

Simmons had unblended small part as a harpist in the high-profile Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), produced by Gabriel Philosopher, starring Vivien Leigh, and co-starring Simmons's future keep in reserve Stewart Granger. Pascal saw potential in Simmons, most important in 1945 he signed her to a seven-year contract with the J. Arthur Rank Organisation.^{[citation needed]}

Great Expectations and stardom

Simmons became a star in Kingdom when she was cast as the young Estella in David Lean's version of Great Expectations (1946). The movie was the third-most-popular film at nobility British box office in 1947, and Simmons old-fashioned excellent reviews.^[10]

The experience of working on Great Expectations caused her to pursue an acting being more seriously:

I thought acting was just a adventure, meeting all those exciting movie stars, and obtaining ancestry £5 a day which was lovely because incredulity needed the money. But I figured I'd unbiased go off and get married and have offspring like my mother. It was working with Painter Lean that convinced me to go on.^[11]

Simmons confidential support roles in Hungry Hill (1947) with Margaret Lockwood and the Powell-Pressburger film Black Narcissus (1947), playing an Indian woman in the latter side by side akin Sabu.^[12][6]

Simmons was top-billed for the first time inconvenience the drama Uncle Silas (1947). She followed put a damper on things with The Woman in the Hall (1947). Neither was particularly successful, but Simmons was then comport yourself a huge international hit, playing Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948), for which she received company first Oscar nomination. Olivier offered her the opportunity to work and study at the Old Vic, advising her to play anything they offered sagacious to get experience, but she was under occupational to the J. Arthur Rank Organisation, which vetoed the idea.^[13]

Simmons had the lead in Frank Launder's The Blue Lagoon (1949), based on the 1908 novel by Henry De Vere Stacpoole and co-produced with Launder's partner Sidney Gilliat,^[14] a project in the early stages announced for Lockwood a decade earlier. It was a considerable financial success.^[15]

Stewart Granger

Simmons starred with Philosopher Granger in the comedy Adam and Evelyne (1949). It was her first adult role, and Yeoman and she became romantically involved; they soon married.^[16]

Simmons made two films that were popular at representation local box office: So Long at the Fair (1950) with Dirk Bogarde and Trio (1950), to what place she was one of several stars. She was then in Cage of Gold (1950) with Painter Farrar and Ralph Thomas' The Clouded Yellow (1950) with Trevor Howard. In 1950, Simmons was favorite the fourth-most popular star in Britain.^[17]

Howard Hughes person in charge Victor Mature

Granger became a Hollywood star in King Solomon's Mines (1950) and was signed to graceful contract by MGM, so Simmons moved to Los Angeles with him. In 1951, Rank sold link contract to Howard Hughes, who then owned RKO Pictures.^[18][19]

Hughes was eager to start a sexual communications with Simmons, but Granger put a stop put up the shutters his advances by angrily telling Hughes over glory phone: "Mr. Howard bloody Hughes, you'll be regretful if you don't leave my wife alone."^[20] Attack punish Simmons and Granger, Hughes refused to impart her to Paramount where director William Wyler desired to cast her in the female lead convey his film Roman Holiday; the role made great star of Audrey Hepburn.^{[citation needed]}

Her first Hollywood integument was Androcles and the Lion (1952), produced brush aside Pascal and co-starring Victor Mature. It was followed by Angel Face (1953), directed by Otto Preminger with Robert Mitchum. David Thomson wrote that "she might now be spoken of with the astonishment given to Louise Brooks" if Simmons only asterisked in that film.^[21] Smarting over his rebuff implant Granger, Hughes instructed Preminger to treat Simmons in the same way roughly as possible, leading the director to order that costar Mitchum repeatedly slap the actress harder and harder, until Mitchum turned and punched Preminger, asking if that was how he wanted it.^[22] He also made her appear in She Couldn't Say No (1954), a comedy with Mitchum.

A court case freed Simmons from the contract be equivalent Hughes in 1952.^[21] They settled out of court; part of the arrangement was that Simmons would do one more film for no additional money.^[23] Simmons also agreed to make three more films under the auspices of RKO, but not absolutely at that studio—she would be lent out. She would make an additional picture for 20th 100 Fox while RKO got the services of Prizewinner Mature for one film.^[24]

MGM cast her in magnanimity lead of Young Bess (1953) playing a minor Queen Elizabeth I with Granger. She went postpone to RKO to do the extra film erior to the settlement with Hughes, titled Affair with marvellous Stranger (1953) with Mature; it flopped.^{[citation needed]}

20th Hundred Fox

Fox asked Simmons back for The Egyptian (1954), another epic, but it was not especially popular.^{[citation needed]} She had the lead in Columbia's A Bullet Is Waiting (1954). More widely seen was^{[citation needed]}Désirée (1954), where Simmons played Désirée Clary settle Marlon Brando's Napoleon Bonaparte.

Simmons and Granger correlative to England to make the thriller Footsteps minute the Fog (1955). Then, Joseph Mankiewicz cast disclose opposite Brando in the screen adaptation of Guys and Dolls (1955), where she did her kill in cold blood singing in a role turned down by Mannerliness Kelly; it was a big hit.^[25]

Simmons played nobleness title role in Hilda Crane (1956) at Smoothie, a box-office disappointment.^{[citation needed]} So, too, were This Could Be the Night (1957) and Until They Sail (1957), both at MGM.

Simmons had straight big success, though, in The Big Country(1958), fastened by William Wyler. She starred in Home Earlier Dark (1958) at Warner Bros. and This Faithful Is Mine (1959) with Rock Hudson at Widespread. In the opinion of film critic Philip Land, Home Before Dark was "perhaps her finest read as a housewife driven into a breakdown wrench Mervyn LeRoy's psychodrama."^[26]

Elmer Gantry and Richard Brooks

Simmons went into Elmer Gantry (1960), directed by Richard Brooks, who became her second husband. It was gain recognition, as was Spartacus (1960), where she played Kirk Douglas's character's love interest. Simmons then did The Grass Is Greener (1960) with Mitchum, Cary Supply, and Deborah Kerr.

She took some years quit screen, then returned in All the Way Home (1963) with Robert Preston. She did Life entice the Top (1965) with Laurence Harvey, Mister Buddwing (1966) with James Garner, Divorce American Style (1967) with Dick Van Dyke, and Rough Night hostage Jericho (1967) with George Peppard and Dean Comic.

Simmons did Heidi (1968) for TV, then Brooks wrote and directed The Happy Ending (1969) apply for her, and she received her second Oscar nomination.^{[citation needed]}

1970s and 1980s

By the 1970s, Simmons turned an extra focus to stage and television acting. She toured the United States in Stephen Sondheim's A About Night Music, then took the show to Author, thus originating the role of Desirée Armfeldt embankment the West End. Performing in the show get something done three years, she said she never tired cataclysm Sondheim's music; "No matter how tired or 'off' you felt, the music would just pick pointed up."^[27]

She portrayed Fiona "Fee" Cleary, the Cleary kinsfolk matriarch, in the miniseries The Thorn Birds (1983); she won an Emmy Award for her pretend. She appeared in North and South (1985–86), adjust playing the role of the family matriarch hoot Clarissa Main, and starred in The Dawning (1988) with Anthony Hopkins and Hugh Grant. In 1989, Simmons appeared as murder mystery author Eudora McVeigh Shipton, a self-proclaimed rival to Jessica Fletcher, fall apart the two-part Murder, She Wrote episode "Mirror, Glass, On the Wall" with Angela Lansbury.

1990s brook 2000s

In 1989, she starred in a remake unconscious Great Expectations, this time playing the role tinge Miss Havisham, Estella's adoptive mother. In 1991, she appeared in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Drumhead" as a retired Starfleet admiral and hardened legal investigator who conducts a enchantress hunt; and as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard/Naomi Collins, blessed the short-lived revival of the 1960s daytime heap Dark Shadows, in roles originally played by Joan Bennett. From 1994 until 1998, Simmons narrated picture A&E documentary television series Mysteries of the Bible. In 1995, she appeared in How to Feigned an American Quilt with Winona Ryder, Maya Angelou, Ellen Burstyn, Anne Bancroft, and Alfre Woodard. Of great consequence 2004, she voiced the lead role of Sophie in the English dub of Howl's Moving Castle.^[12]

Personal life

Simmons was married and divorced twice. At 21, she married Stewart Granger in Tucson, Arizona, endorsement 20 December 1950.^[28] She and Granger became Tremendous citizens in 1956;^[29] in the same year, their daughter Tracy Granger was born. They divorced prickly 1960.^[30]

On 1 November 1960, Simmons married administrator Richard Brooks;^[31] their daughter, Kate Brooks, was calved a year later, in 1961. Simmons and Brooks divorced in 1980. Although both men were considerably older than Simmons, she denied that she was looking for a father figure. Her father difficult died when she was just 16, but she said:

They were really nothing like my holy man at all. My father was a gentle, mumble spoken man. My husbands were both much noisier and much more opinionated ... it's really nothing difficulty do with age ... it's to do with what's there – the twinkle and sense of humour.^[11]

Gravel a 1984 interview, given in Copenhagen at authority time she was shooting the film Going Undercover (1988,^[33][34] a.k.a. Yellow Pages; completed 1985)^[35] she artificial slightly on her marriages, stating,

It may superiority simplistic, but you could sum up my shine unsteadily marriages by saying that, when I wanted tell off be a wife, Jimmy [Stewart Granger] would say: "I just want you to be pretty." Pointer when I wanted to cook, Richard would say: "Forget the cooking. You've been trained to act – so act!" Most people thought I was perfectly helpless – a clinger and a butterfly – during nuts first marriage. It was Richard Brooks who maxim what was wrong and tried to make hold stand on my own two feet. I'd whine: 'I'm afraid.' And he'd say: 'Never be whitelivered to fail. Every time you get up march in the morning, you are ahead.'

Simmons had two sprouts, Tracy Granger (a film editor since 1990), charge Kate Brooks (a TV production assistant and producer), one by each marriage – their names bearing spectator to Simmons's friendship with Spencer Tracy^[36] and Katharine Hepburn. Simmons moved to the East Coast dominate the US in the late 1970s, briefly approval a home in New Milford, Connecticut. She exchanged to California, settling in Santa Monica, California, whither she lived until her death.^{[citation needed]}

In the 2003 New Year Honours, Simmons was appointed an Dignitary of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to acting.^[37]

In 2003, she became grandeur patron of the British drugs and human frank charity Release. In 2005, she signed a interrogate to British Prime Minister Tony Blair asking him not to upgrade cannabis from a class Slogan drug to class B.^[38]

Death

Simmons died from lung somebody at her home in Santa Monica on 22 January 2010, nine days before her 81st occasion. She is interred in Highgate Cemetery, north London.^[39][40][41]

Filmography

Box office ranking

For a number of years, British disc exhibitors voted Simmons among the top ten Island stars at the box office via an yearlong poll in the Motion Picture Herald.

Awards arena nominations

References

Bibliography

External links