Early Life and Career
Simmons was born in Lower Holloway, London, England, to Charles Simmons and his wife, Winifred (Loveland) Simmons. Jean was the youngest of four children with siblings Edna, Harold and Lorna. She began acting at the age of 14. During World War II, the Simmons family was evacuated to Winscombe in Somerset. Her father, a physical education teacher (who had represented Great Britain in the 1912 Summer Olympics), taught briefly at Sidcot School, and sometime during this period Simmons followed her elder sister on to the village stage and sang songs such as "Daddy Wouldn't Buy Me a Bow Wow". Returning to London and just enrolled at the Aida Foster School of Dance, she was spotted by the director Val Guest, who cast her in the Margaret Lockwood vehicle Give Us the Moon. Small roles in several other films followed including the high profile Caesar and Cleopatra, produced by Gabriel Pascal. Pascal saw potential in Simmons and in 1945 he signed her to a seven year contract. Prior to moving to Hollywood, she played the young Estella in David Lean's version of Great Expectations (1946) and Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948), for which she received her first Oscar nomination. It was the experience of working on Great Expectations that caused her to pursue an acting career more seriously:
| “ | I thought acting was just a lark, meeting all those exciting movie stars, and getting £5 a day which was lovely because we needed the money. But I figured I'd just go off and get married and have children like my mother. It was working with David Lean that convinced me to go on. | ” |
Playing Ophelia in Olivier's Hamlet made her a star, although she was already well known for her work in other British films, including her first starring role in the film adaptation of Uncle Silas, and Black Narcissus (both 1947). Olivier offered her the chance to work and study at the Bristol Old Vic, advising her to play anything they threw at her to get experience; she was under contract to the Rank Organisation who vetoed the idea. Rank was unhappy at this time also that Stewart Granger was pursuing his young star and, (according to the actor's account), confronted Granger ("a shop-worn thirty-four"), at a meeting at the Dorchester Hotel saying that what was going on was wrong since he was a married man with two children. Granger told Rank he had been divorced for six months, and left. In 1949 Simmons starred with Granger in Adam and Evelyne. In 1950 Rank sold Simmons's contract to Howard Hughes, who then owned the RKO studio in Hollywood. That year she was voted the fourth most popular star in Britain.
In 1950 she married the English actor Stewart Granger, with whom she appeared in several films, successfully making the transition to an American career. She made four films for Hughes, including Angel Face, directed by Otto Preminger. According to David Thomson "if she had made only one film – Angel Face – she might now be spoken of with the awe given to Louise Brooks." A court case freed her from the contract with Hughes in 1952. In 1953 she starred alongside Spencer Tracy in The Actress, a film that was one of her personal favourites. Among the many films she appeared in during this period were The Robe (1953), Young Bess (1953), Désirée (1954), The Egyptian (1954), Guys and Dolls (1955) – "in which she's delightfully proper (and improper) as the Salvation Army officer Sarah Brown" – The Big Country (1958), Elmer Gantry (1960), (directed by her second husband, Richard Brooks), Spartacus (1960), All the Way Home (1963) – a film of James Agee's novel, A Death in the Family – and The Happy Ending (1969), again directed by Brooks and for which she received her second Oscar nomination. In the opinion of film critic Philip French, a film of 1958, Home Before Dark, saw her give "perhaps her finest performance as a housewife driven into a breakdown in Mervyn LeRoy's psychodrama."
By the 1970s Simmons turned her focus to stage and television acting. She toured the United States in Stephen Sondheim's well-reviewed musical A Little Night Music, then took the show to London, and thus originated the role of Desirée Armfeldt on the West End. Doing the show for three years, she said she never tired of Sondheim's music; "No matter how tired or off you felt, the music would just pick you up."
She portrayed Fiona Cleary, Cleary family matriarch, in the 1983 mini-series, The Thorn Birds; she won an Emmy Award for her role.
In 1985 and 1986 she appeared in North & South, again playing the role of the family matriarch as Clarissa Main.
In 1988 she starred in The Dawning with Anthony Hopkins and Hugh Grant, and in 1989 she again starred in a mini-series, this time a version of Great Expectations, in which she played the role of Miss Havisham, Estella's adoptive mother. Simmons made a late career appearance in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Drumhead" as a retired Starfleet admiral and hardened legal investigator who conducts a witch-hunt. In 1991 she appeared in the short-lived revival of the 1960s daytime series Dark Shadows, in roles originally played by Joan Bennett. From 1994 until 1998 Simmons narrated the A&E documentary television series, Mysteries of the Bible. In 2004 Simmons voiced the lead-role of Sophie in the English dub of Howl's Moving Castle.
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