Demure British beauty Jean Simmons was born January 31, 1929, in Crouch End, London. As a 14-year-old dance student, she was plucked from her school to play Margaret Lockwood's precocious sister in Give Us the Moon (1944). She had a small part as a harpist in the high-profile Caesar und Cleopatra (1945), produced by Gabriel Pascal, starring Vivien Leigh, and co-starring her future husband Stewart Granger. Pascal saw potential in Simmons, and in 1945 he signed her to a seven-year contract to the J. Arthur Rank Organization, and she went on to make a name for herself in such major British productions as Die großen Erwartungen (1946) (as the spoiled, selfish Estella), Die schwarze Narzisse (1947) (as a sultry native beauty), Hamlet (1948) (playing Ophelia to Laurence Olivier's great Dane and earning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination), Die blaue Lagune (1949) and Paris um Mitternacht (1950), among others.
In 1950, she married Stewart Granger, and that same year, she moved to Hollywood. While Granger was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Rank sold her contract to Howard Hughes, who then owned RKO Pictures. Hughes was eager to start a sexual relationship with Simmons, but Granger put a stop to his advances. Her first Hollywood film was Androkles und der Löwe (1952), produced by Pascal and co-starring Victor Mature. It was followed by Engelsgesicht (1952), directed by Otto Preminger with Robert Mitchum. To further punish Simmons and Granger, Hughes refused to lend her to Paramount, where William Wyler wanted to cast her in the female lead for his film Ein Herz und eine Krone (1953); the role made a star of Audrey Hepburn. A court case freed Simmons from the contract with Hughes in 1952. They settled out of court; part of the arrangement was that Simmons would do one more film for no additional money. Simmons also agreed to make three more movies under the auspices of RKO, but not actually at that studio - she would be lent out. MGM cast her in the lead of Die Thronfolgerin (1953) playing a young Queen Elizabeth I with Granger. She went back to RKO to do the extra film under the settlement with Hughes, titled Ein Mann ohne Bedeutung (1953) with Mature; it flopped.
Simmons went over to 20th Century Fox to play the female lead in Das Gewand (1953), the first CinemaScope movie and an enormous financial success. Less popular was Theaterfieber (1953) at MGM alongside Spencer Tracy, despite superb reviews; it was one of her personal favorites. Fox asked Simmons back for Sinuhe, der Ägypter (1954), another epic, but it was not especially popular. She had the lead in Columbia's Eine Kugel wartet (1954). More popular with moviegoers was Desirée (1954), where Simmons played Désirée Clary to Marlon Brando's Napoleon Bonaparte. Simmons and Granger returned to England to make the thriller Zwischen Haß und Liebe (1955). She then starred in the musical Schwere Jungen, leichte Mädchen (1955) with Brando and Frank Sinatra; she used her own singing voice and earned her first Golden Globe Award. Simmons played the title role in Hilda Crane (1956) at Fox, a commercial failure. So, too, were Kein Platz für feine Damen (1957) and Land ohne Männer (1957), both at MGM. Simmons had a big success, though, in Weites Land (1958), directed by Wyler. She starred in Bevor die Nacht anbricht (1958) at Warner Bros. and Diese Erde ist mein (1959) with Rock Hudson at Universal.
Simmons divorced Granger in 1960 and almost immediately married writer-director Richard Brooks, who cast her as Sister Sharon opposite Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry - Gott ist im Geschäft (1960), a memorable adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel. That same year, she co-starred with Kirk Douglas in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960) and played a would-be homewrecker opposite Cary Grant in Vor Hausfreunden wird gewarnt (1960).
Off the screen for a few years, Jean captivated moviegoers with a brilliant performance as the mother in All the Way Home (1963), a literate, tasteful adaptation of James Agee's "A Death in the Family". However, after that, she found quality projects somewhat harder to come by, and took work in Ein Platz ganz oben (1965), Gesicht ohne Namen (1966), Scheidung auf amerikanisch (1967), Als Jim Dolan kam (1967), Happy-End für eine Ehe (1969) (a Richard Brooks film for which she was again Oscar-nominated, this time as Best Actress).
Jean continued making films well into the 1970s. In the 1980s, she appeared mainly in television miniseries, such as Fackeln im Sturm (1985) and
Die Dornenvögel (1983). She made a comeback to films in 1995 in Ein amerikanischer Quilt (1995) co-starring Winona Ryder and Anne Bancroft, and most recently voiced the elderly Sophie in the English version of Hayao Miyazaki's Das wandelnde Schloss (2004). She now resided in Santa Monica, California, with her dog, Mr. Gates, and her two cats, Adisson and Megan. Jean Simmons died of lung cancer on January 22, 2010, nine days before her 81st birthday.
