Esteemed Actress Jean Simmons Passes
Film star also appeared in The Thorn Birds and many other television productions.
Jean Simmons, the actress who began her career in her native England and eventually found steady work in American films and television from the 1950s onward, died January 22, 2010, at her home in Santa Monica. Simmons, who was 80, had been fighting lung cancer.
Born in London on January 31, 1929, Simmons her first screen appearance in the 1942 production Give Us the Moon. She went on to appear in other films, including Caesar and Cleopatra, The Way to the Stars and Mr. Emmanuel. These led to a more prominent role as the young Estella in David Lean’s Great Expectations, followed by a role in Black Narcissus.
Her breakthrough came in 1948, when she played Ophelia opposite Laurence Olivier’s lead performance in Hamlet, which won the Oscar for Best Picture, and for which she garnered an Oscar nomination.
After that, she began to find work in the U.S., including such movies as Young Bess, The Robe, Désirée, Angel Face and Guys and Dolls.
She also appeared on stage in such productions as Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music.
She also had a long television resume, which included roles in the made-for-TV movies and miniseries The Thorn Birds, Valley of the Dolls, A Small Killing, North and South and North and South: Book II. She also appeared in episodes of such series as Hawaii Five-O, Murder, She Wrote and Dark Shadows.
Simmons worked until very recently. She did voice work for the English-language version of Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle and starred in the 2009 film Shadows in the Sun.
She was married twice: first to actor Stewart Granger, and later to writer-director Richard Brooks. Both ended in divorce.
She is survived by one daughter from her marriage to Granger, and another daughter from her marriage to Brooks.