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Black Narcissus | Great Expectations | Life at the Top
Date of birth: 31/01/1929
Place of Birth: Crouch Hill, London
Resides: Santa Monica, California.
Vivien Leigh's Younger, Sweeter Sister?
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The beautiful female star of David Lean's Great Expectations, Laurence Olivier's Hamlet and Stanley Kubrick's Sparticus, Jean Simmons has played opposite the greatest actors of her generation. Her career has spanned six decades.
Producer Val Guest lifted Simmons out of a dancing school in the dreary suburb of Cricklewood after she had attended just two weeks tuition. Guest saw in Simmons the fresh face needed for his upcoming film Give Us the Moon (1943). Simmons was fourteen and her father warned her luck would not last. He was wrong.
Simmons' beauty and genuine, if untrained, talent carried her from success to success. In 1946, she played Estella in Great Expectations alongside soon to be famous actors John Mills and Alec Guinness. Two years later, Laurence Olivier desperate that she play Ophelia in his new production of Hamlet, pleaded with Rank organisation (to whom she was contracted) for 30 days of her time. They agreed.
Jean Simmons
