Jean Simmons

Jean Simmons

1929–2010

When Jean Simmons was 15, director Val Guest plucked her out of a dance class outside London to appear in his 1944 film Give Us the Moon. Her father was not impressed. “You’ll be back here soon,” he said, “so keep your head screwed on tight.” But Simmons would never again be just a small-town girl, as her natural poise and quiet beauty made her one of the 1950s’ best-known actresses.

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After Give Us the Moon, she played a series of “dangerously troubled figures in postwar British classics,” said the London Guardian. They included Estella, “the willful agent of the destructive Miss Havisham in David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), the eastern temptress in the Himalayan convent in Black Narcissus (1947), and Ophelia in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948),” which earned her an Oscar nomination. In 1950, she moved to Hollywood, where the “capricious” Howard Hughes bought her contract. “Everything was taken out of my hands,” she recalled. “I made a few pictures which practically put my career in the toilet.”

But before long, Simmons was a major star, said The New York Times, specializing in “demure” but determined “supporting roles in the shadow of strong men.” She appeared opposite Richard Burton in The Robe (1953) and Gregory Peck in The Big Country (1958) and paired with Marlon Brando twice. The first time, in Desiree (1954), she was mistress to his Napoleon; the following year she was the “decorous, straight-laced Sgt. Sarah Brown of the Save-a-Soul

Mission, who was bedeviled by Brando’s Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls.” Two of her greatest roles followed: Varinia, “the spirited slave who falls in love with Kirk Douglas in Spartacus (1960),” and Sister Sharon Falconer, “the half-genuine, half-fraudulent revivalist preacher who succumbs to Burt Lancaster’s con man in Elmer Gantry (1960).”

Although Simmons earned a second Oscar nomination, as an alcoholic wife who leaves her marriage in The Happy Ending (1969), “she found good roles harder to come by” in the 1970s, said the Los Angeles Times. “Increasingly she turned to television,” appearing on such shows as The Odd Couple and Hawaii Five-O, and earning an Emmy for the miniseries The Thorn Birds, in 1983. She entered the Betty Ford Clinic for alcoholism in the 1980s, but continued to work; she was memorable in a Disney version of Great Expectations “as the miserable recluse Miss Havisham,” recalling her appearance in the David Lean classic of many years before. Simmons, who died of lung cancer, is survived by two daughters.