Jean Simmons: Portrait of a Complicated Lady

She burst onto the screen at 17 as Estella, Miss Havisham’s cruel, beguiling ward in David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946). Forty-three years later, she played crumbling old Miss Havisham in a TV miniseries. Between those landmarks, Jean Simmons, who died Jan. 22 at 80, traced the career arc of so many actresses whose beauty and brilliance the movies first exploit, then ignore.

Born in London to a schoolteacher and his wife, Simmons was the instant darling of the British film industry. Before she was 21, she played an exotic slave girl in Black Narcissus and the nature child finding love in The Blue Lagoon and was the Oscar-nominated Ophelia to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet.

In Hollywood, she lent her regal allure to princesses (Young Bess), psycho killers (Angel Face) and compromised preachers (Guys and Dolls, Elmer Gantry). She did comedies (The Grass Is Greener) and westerns (The Big Country). When an epic film needed an enchantress–as did The Robe, The Egyptian and Spartacus–she was the go-to lady, a vessel of beauty and hauteur.

By the mid-’60s, that attitude was obsolete. But Simmons kept working in films, theater and TV until her death, investing every role with her unique touch of class.