Classy Jean Simmons 1929-2010
Monday, January 25th, 2010
A publicity still from the 1950s.
The always classy actress Jean Simmons passed away over the weekend of lung cancer just shy of her 81st birthday this Sunday. One of my all time favorite moments in any film is her drunken seduction/dance opposite Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls (1955).
She first earned acclaimed as Ophelia opposite Laurence Oliver in Hamlet (1948), earning an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. Her performance as evangelist Sister Sharon opposite Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry (1960) is one of the finest performances in her career.
Her other memorable screen roles include All the Way Home (1963), a nice display of her comedic skills opposite Cary Grant in The Grass Is Greener (1960), and another Oscar nominated role as an unhappy wife in The Happy Ending, directed by her husband at the time, Richard Brooks. In the category of a “guilty pleasure,” I loved her in the little seen Robert Wise romantic comedy This Could Be The Night (1957) opposite Paul Douglas, Anthony Franciosa and Joan Blondell.

A recent shot of Jean Simmons.
TV fans from the 1980s might remember her as the patriarch of the Cleary family (an Emmy winning performance) in the popular 1983 mini-series, The Thorn Birds, or as a diplomat, Admiral Satie, who has lost her sense of justice as she conducts a trial to uncover sabotage on a memorable episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Drumhead” (1991). More recently she was the voice of the grandmother in the English language of the Japanese animation Howl’s Moving Castle (2004).
By all accounts she was a lovely person as well as a wonderful actress.


Soupy Sales



