THE ENGLISH ROSES (V)


JEAN SIMMONS


Like Virginia McKenna, Jean Simmons knew only too well what it was like to live on the land and be surrounded by wildlife. At the time her film career was taking shape, she was married to Stewart Granger and owned a 10,000‑acre ranch in Tucson, Arizona and a 70,000-acre ranch in Silver City, New Mexico, where she spent her time surrounded by cattle. However, it would appear that, although she was content at times with her Wild West lifestyle, she was much happier in homes around Hollywood. Like the one looking out to the Santa Monica mountains; this was her Californian mountain eyrie with the cricket‑bat window pane, where once had lived character actor and former Sussex cricketer, Sir C. Aubrey Smith.

Born in 1929, this beautiful and talented British actress made her first film at fourteen, when she was chosen from a group of dance students to play Margaret Lockwood’s younger sister in Give Us the Moon. At 5:30pm on a fateful Friday, 13 August, 1943, she was interviewed amongst 200 other hopefuls and within an hour, without a screen‑test, her Rank contract was signed. It was the end of her dancing dreams - but by the time she was seventeen she had achieved stardom.

From 1946 to 1953 she made at least two films a year for Rank and her roles included the spoiled young Estella in David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), the native girl infatuated by Sabu in Black Narcissus (1947), the ship‑wrecked child in Blue Lagoon (1949), and in the same year a delightful performance as the young orphan who takes Stewart Granger as her father in Adam And Evelyne. Laurence Olivier chose her for Ophelia in his filming of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a performance that won her Best Actress awards in Europe as well as an Oscar nomination. When she was seventeen, the film capital had already acknowledged her talent.

Jean Simmons was a graceful and delicate beauty, and of all the British actresses of the period could perhaps have been most easily stereotyped as the archetypal rose. Except her performances and films were so varied, and because Hollywood captured her at such an early stage in her life and career, the dreaded two words never quite stuck. Unlike most of her fellow Brits, Hollywood, after a miserable start, suited her well. She arrived in 1950, sold by Rank to Howard Hughes’s RKO, and by 1953 had freed herself in the courts from the legal binds of the contract. At the age of twenty-four, her career was ready to fly internationally.

Stewart Granger, on meeting her for the first time when working on Caesar And Cleopatra (1945), referred to her as ‘a scruffy little rat’. Jean Simmons’ reply to the press was ‘I got a terrible pash on him. I also got his autograph’. There always seemed to be a genuinely innocent and vulnerable quality about her, and for this reason in most of her roles she would always be on the side of the angels.