Hollywood great Jean Simmons dies

BRITISH actress Jean Simmons, whose ethereal screen presence and starring roles with Hollywood greats made her a mid-century film icon, has died at the age of 80.

The Oscar-nominated actress, who sang with Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls, co-starred with Gregory Peck and played Ophelia to Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, died on Friday at her home in Santa Monica, said her agent Judy Page. She had lung cancer.

Born in Crouch End, London, and already a stunning beauty at 14, Simmons made her movie debut in the 1944 British production Give us the Moon.

Several minor films followed before British director David Lean gave the actress her breakthrough role of Estella, companion to the reclusive Miss Havisham in 1946's Great Expectations.

This was followed by the exotic Black Narcissus, and then Olivier's Oscar-winning Hamlet in 1948, for which Simmons was nominated as best supporting actress.

She would be nominated for another Oscar, for best actress for 1969's The Happy Ending, before moving largely to television roles from the 1970s to the 1990s.

She won an Emmy Award for her role in the 1980s miniseries The Thorn Birds.

Her other notable films included Elmer Gantry (with Burt Lancaster), Until They Sail (with Paul Newman),The Big Country (with Gregory Peck), Spartacus, (with Kirk Douglas ), This Earth is Mine (with Rock Hudson), All the Way Home (with Robert Preston), Mister Buddwing (with James Garner) and Rough Night in Jericho (with Dean Martin).

Simmons left Britain for Hollywood in 1950, accompanied by her future husband and fellow actor Stewart Granger. There, they were befriended by tycoon Howard Hughes, who flew them to Tucson, Arizona, for a surprise wedding.

"When I returned from the honeymoon," Simmons told a reporter in 1964, "I learned that Hughes owned me – he had bought me from (British producer] J Arthur Rank, like a piece of meat."

What followed was a string of films that she would later dismiss as terrible, although she took some solace in the fact that Hughes, legendary in those days as a womaniser, never bothered her.

"I was married to Jimmy (Granger's real name was James Stewart], so Hughes remained at a distance," she recalled. "But those movies! So terrible they aren't even on video cassettes." Among the titles were Angel Face, Affair with a Stranger and She Couldn't Say No.

Simmons finally ended up suing Hughes for the right to make more prestigious films at other studios, and the result was Young Bess (as young Queen Elizabeth I), The Actress, The Egyptian and Desiree. In the latter film, in 1954, she played the title role opposite Brando's Napoleon.

The pair teamed again in 1955 for Guys and Dolls, the Samuel Goldwyn-produced musical in which Simmons is Sarah Brown, a Salvation Army-style reformer conned into a weekend fling in Havana by gambler Sky Masterson.

She loved the rehearsals for that film, Simmons recalled in 1988, "especially the dancing routines, with Marlon trying not to step on me and choreographer Michael Kidd looking very worried".

"I got to sing," she added, "because Sam Goldwyn said, 'You might as well wreck it with your own voice than somebody else's.'"

By the 1970s, her career as a lead film actress had ended, but Simmons continued to work regularly on stage and in television.

In the 1980s and 1990s she appeared on television shows such as Murder, She Wrote, In the Heat of the Night and Xena: Warrior Princess. She also appeared in numerous TV movies and miniseries, including a 1991 version of Great Expectations, in which, this time round, she played Miss Havisham.

The careers of both Simmons and her Granger had flourished in the 1950s, he as a swashbuckler, she as the demure heroine. But long absences on film locations strained their relationship, and they divorced in 1960. They had a daughter, Tracy.

Shortly after her divorce, Simmons married Richard Brooks, who had directed her in Elmer Gantry and would again in The Happy Ending. Their marriage, which produced a daughter, Kate, ended in divorce in 1977.