As a middle-class girl who grew up in Cricklewood, north London, she got a lot of work as a child actor without becoming a child star. But as a teenager fame came rapidly as Estella, destructive agent of the vengeful Miss Haversham in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946), as a native temptress in the Himalayan convent in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947), and a blonde Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948), for which she won an Oscar, though she'd never read or seen a Shakespeare play before.
In Hollywood she got off to a bad start because Howard Hughes had bought her contract from the Rank Organisation. Once she obtained her freedom, a succession of roles made her famous and respected. The parts ranged from a dangerous psychopath in Angel Face to a gentle Roman patrician in the first CinemaScope release, The Robe. She appeared opposite Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy, Richard Burton, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando (twice), Burt Lancaster and Cary Grant, and was directed by Otto Preminger, George Cukor, Joseph L Mankiewicz, William Wyler, Stanley Kubrick and Richard Brooks. A number of these pictures are classics, among them Guys and Dolls, in which she's delightfully proper (and improper) as the Salvation Army officer Sarah Brown; Spartacus (her first meeting with fellow slave Kirk Douglas has remarkable erotic and moral power); and in the epic western The Big Country, where as a local schoolmistress she was a restraining force in a threatened Texas range war. But perhaps her finest performance was as a housewife driven into a breakdown in Mervyn LeRoy's psychodrama Home Before Dark (1958).
She has made little of consequence for the cinema after the early Sixties, though did interesting work for television (playing Miss Haversham in a 1989 television film) and was outstanding as Desirée Armfeldt in the 1975 West End production of Sondheim's A Little Night Music, better, it's said, than Glynis Johns who created the role on Broadway, and far superior to Elizabeth Taylor in the film version.
James Agee on her Ophelia, Time 1948 'The only person in the picture who gives every one of her lines the bloom of poetry and the immediacy of ordinary life.' In 1963 Simmons appeared as Agee's mother in All the Way Home, a film of his novel, A Death in the Family.
Regrets and rejections Howard Hughes prevented Simmons from appearing in Roman Holiday. She turned down the female lead in the 1992 TV sitcom As Time Goes By
Simmons on her hometown 'No Cricklewood girl would ever admit to being from there.'
Essential DVDs Great Expectations, Hamlet, Guys and Dolls, The Big Country, Spartacus, Elmer Gantry.
Next week: James Mason
