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A child actress in Britain, an adult star in Hollywood; Jean Simmons has had a wonderful movie career but she's not content to merely look back on past glories, as FOCUS discovers.
The joy of cinema is that great performances and wonderful old movies can be discovered by a new generation at any moment. Which is doubtless part of the rationale for re-issuing classics as film distributor Park Circus does to such good effect throughout the year, and Universal are currently doing with Spartacus hitting selected screens up and down the country.
By chance this re-release of Stanley Kubrick's 1960 tale of slave revolt in Roman times coincides with a new film from its leading lady, Jean Simmons. If the juxtaposition of Simmons at 30 in Kubrick's film, and nearly 50 years older in her latest Shadows In The Sun is arresting it only takes a moment to recognise the talented English beauty who captivated Hollywood in the 1950s.
Crouch End is not an obvious breeding ground for movie stars, yet before she was out of her teens Simmons had appeared in Anthony Asquith's The Way to the Stars, won notice as Estella in David Lean's Great Expectations, worked with Michael Powell on Black Narcissus and was Oscar nominated playing Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet.
"I was 14 when I started," she says from her home in California. "I went to Ada Foster's dancing school, and had only been there for a few weeks when Mrs Foster said I must come with her to be interviewed. So I went, read a few lines for Val Guest and suddenly I was in a movie.
"That's how it happened. Little parts came along and I wasn't taking it seriously but the money was very nice - we got £5 a day. Eventually when I was working with David Lean I thought I'd like to keep doing this. But it took a couple of years for me to think that this would be a nice career."
Nice is the word, for at an age when ambitious young actresses today are auditioning for drama school and looking for an agent, Simmons was experiencing some of the rarefied lifestyle a star of that era might expect.
"I do have wonderful memories," she adds, "and I was able to travel. We went all the way down to Australia by flying boat, it took us about seven days. It was an extraordinary experience, I had my 18th birthday down there. Then coming back through Hollywood I met stars like Ingrid Bergman and Elizabeth Taylor, it was mind boggling.
"We crossed the country to New York and came back on the Queen Mary. My God, I met Eleanor Roosevelt on board. She was just lovely, she gave me a bunch of violets. They are really quite extraordinary experiences that I've had in my life, a kid from - I was born in Crouch End but I grew up in Cricklewood."
And from Cricklewood to that similar sounding, though generally sunnier place. But Simmons' initial experiences there were far from comfortable as she found herself tied into a contract to tycoon and sometime movie mogul Howard Hughes. Bravely she decided to extricate herself from it through the courts.
"I tried to, but it wasn't really my idea, that was Jimmy's idea," she explains, referring to then husband Stewart Granger who had changed his name from James Stewart to avoid confusion with the already established American star. "Now I don’t even remember why we were even suing Howard Hughes. He was very nice to me, very understanding and very sweet."
I mention a couple of favourite films of hers and Jean Simmons asks, with girlish curiosity, which they might be. The answer is Joe Mankiewicz's Guys & Dolls with Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra, and The Big Country in which William Wyler directed her and Gregory Peck in 1958.
"Guys & Dolls was fun," she sighs, "I couldn't wait to get to work because we were rehearsing with [choreographer] Michael Kidd, who was fabulous. It was an absolute joy. In fact, whenever Joe said 'print' we'd get very depressed because we wouldn't get to do it again. But it was great, great fun.
"And The Big Country was wonderful in one sense, but it was also kind of a nightmare because Willy Wyler kept re-writing it. We'd go home at night on the location and we'd learn the new lines and arrive next morning to find it had been re-written again. It was a little bit frustrating, but the great thing for me was that I got to ride my own horse, Harry Boy."
After that the big roles kept on coming; Spartacus with Kirk Douglas; Elmer Gantry opposite Burt Lancaster for her second husband Richard Brooks, who later directed her to another Oscar nomination in The Happy Ending.
But as much as she fondly remembers the past Simmons is quick to praise contemporary talent, notably Kate Winslet in The Reader. This of course is one Ophelia acknowledging another, Winslet having played the role for Kenneth Branagh in 1996, which offers a pertinent reminder that movies consistently reinvent great stories for each new generation.
If Jean Simmons' performance as Hannah in Shadows In The Sun offers a romantic evocation of a character reflecting on her past Jean Simmons herself has not quite finished looking to the future yet.
"I call myself semi-retired, but if something wonderful came up for an old lady it would be fun to do," she chuckles. But whether it does or not she at least has some marvellous memories to reflect upon, and - let's hope - a book somewhere down the line.
"There was one friend who I adored, we saw a lot of him, Spencer Tracy. You look back at his career, boy, he was quite extraordinary. How lucky I was to work with all these terrific people, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas. God I really should write it down. I never kept a diary, which was really silly of me."
But at least she can take some comfort from the prospect of new audiences discovering her great work on cinema screens at any moment. "It is amazing when you think of it," she adds, "once it's on film it's there for good."
And that's something for which anyone with even a passing affection for film can be truly grateful.
ANWAR BRETT
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