Jean Simmons: A brief biography
From an item I bought on ebay
Charming 8 X 10 B&W glossy photo of young actress JEAN SIMMONS. A
luminous, blonde beauty, Jean Simmons was a star in her native
Britain and in the U.S. who first appeared on screen at age 14 in
Give Us the Moon (1944), but did not become a true star until she
played Estella in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946). In
1948, she was hand-picked by Laurence Olivier to play the doomed
Ophelia in his classic version of Hamlet and won a Best Actress
Prize at the Venice Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination
for her efforts. In the same year she played the Indian girl Kanchi in
Powell & Pressburger's Black Narcissus. When Olivier saw her he couldn't
believe it was the same person that was playing Ophelia for him.
Simmons travelled to Hollywood in 1950 after
marrying Stewart Granger. Their marriage lasted a decade and
Simmons then became Mrs. Richard Brooks in 1960, the year he
starred her in Elmer Gantry. During the '50s and '60s, Simmons
had an extremely busy film career appearing in everything from
costume epics to romances to musicals to straight dramas. Simmons
received an Oscar nomination in 1969 for The Happy Ending. By the
mid -70s, Simmons started working less frequently and divided her
time between features and television work. In the late '80s, she
had a burst of character roles, but has since made increasingly
sporadic forays into acting.
Note: Although Stewart Granger never appeared in any P&P
films he was a friend of theirs & it was he who first suggested
that they should use Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes.
