Word: greats
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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...
...think she's very pretty," says poor young Pip of the slightly older Estella. "I think she's very proud." Extraordinarily pretty and proudly defiant: that was the indelible 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...
...waywardness of her beauty: a triangular face dominated by large eyes and high cheekbones leading to a small, voluptuous mouth that could be sullen or amused. Her attitude promised a challenge to any man who would seek to love or tame her. That's clear in the 1946 Great Expectations, where her Estella calls Pip a "coarse little monster" at one moment and says, "You may kiss me if you like" the next. She steals Pip's heart, and breaks it, with the same cool smile...
Soon Simmons had caught the eyes of virtually every top filmmaker in Britain. After her turn in Great Expectations, Olivier tangled with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger over who would win her services, either as a Himalayan dancing girl in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947) or as Ophelia in Hamlet (1948). The directors finally agreed to rearrange their schedules so Simmons could appear in both films. In Black Narcissus she donned brownface to play the Himalayan girl Kanchi, who performs a wild native dance (it's mostly just running) and gets whipped for her insolence. Simmons's blond...
...tradition that goes back to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, in which political leaders used symbols of Russian grandeur - including an entirely submissive church - to create greater support for the regime," says Jean Gueit, rector of the Nice cathedral. "Russian society has been so disoriented and adrift following the changes of the past 20 years that Putin is playing the old nationalist game to snap people out of it by responding to simplistic messages and emotions. Part of that is rebuilding the equally shattered Russian Orthodox Church and help it snatch up all these parishes abroad...