Word: actress
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British directors had exoticized Simmons' beauty; the Americans mostly domesticated it. She suited Hollywood's fondness for coming-of-age stories about the great and famous. In George Cukor's The Actress she played the teenage Ruth Gordon, desperate for Broadway acclaim; in The Young Bess Simmons was a budding Queen of England, co-starring with her first husband, Stewart Granger. She ornamented De Mille-style antique epics like The Robe and The Egyptian, which required only that she look good and speak well. And she went up against Brando first in the 1954 Desirée, where...
...first impression the 17-year-old Jean Simmons made on moviegoers in David Lean's Great Expectations in 1946, at the beginning of a long, full career that lasted from her early teens to her death on Jan. 22 at 80, in Santa Monica, Calif., of lung cancer. The actress's screen impact in her early flush of stardom could also be defined by another pair of clashing adjectives that a British distributor slapped onto She Couldn't Say No, a minor Simmons vehicle from 1954: Beautiful but Dangerous...
...again, and as a freelancer forged a strong résumé that cast her opposite Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier, Robert Mitchum (twice with each star), Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Richard Burton and other dominant movie males. She earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, in the 1969 The Happy Ending, to go with the Supporting Actress Oscar nomination she had received for playing Ophelia to Olivier's Hamlet in her teens. (Watch TIME's 2009 Fond Farewells video...
That's a grudging remark to make about an actress who had 60 years of film and TV roles ahead of her. After playing in a few other British films, notably as Emmeline the nubile castaway (the role that brought stardom to Brooke Shields three decades later) in Frank Launder's The Blue Lagoon, Simmons went to Hollywood and stayed there. Her first of four movies for Hughes was her best: Otto Preminger's Angel Face (1952), essentially a feature-length rendition of the Ophelia mad scene. As Diane, a young Englishwoman in Southern California, she's in hysterics when...
...nervous habit of unbuttoning the middle button on her army jacket. Then, on a night in Havana with Brando's Sky Masterson (he's made a $1,000 bet he can take her there), she's the innocent blossoming into sexual joy. That emotional unbuttoning is something the actress had rarely been allowed to portray in her early roles, except for The Blue Lagoon. As Estella, for example, she is selfishly pleased with the shattering impact of first love on Pip; here a Simmons character gets to experience the sunburst of that poignant rapture on herself. She sings, dances (with...