Remembering Jean

Jean Simmons was born on 31 January 1929 in Islington, London, a place I was once very familiar with in my earlier years. It was where I had my studio, and where a myriad of memories are conjured.

Jean played the female lead opposite Richard Burton in The Robe (1953), the first CinemaScope film and an enormous financial success. This exceptional film was broadcast by BBC2 over Easter 2020.

The 5' 4" tall actress was beautiful in so many ways; especially her softly spoken English voice that was every bit as alluring as the rest of her. Feminine tenderness and charm were her hall-mark.

She died from lung cancer at her home in Santa Monica on 22 January 2010, nine days before her eighty-first birthday. Jean's home was minutes away from my cousin (daughter of a maternal cousin) who works in the industry, and is the only remaining relative with whom I still have close contact.

Jean Simmons is interred in Highgate Cemetery, another place with which I am more than well acquainted and have spoken about. The place, not publicised, is probably difficult to locate by those without knowledge of it. Strangely, no published biography or autobiography of Jean Simmons exists.

        

Above is the front and rear of Jean Simmons' Santa Monica home in California, very close to my first cousin once removed. The Southern Colonial-style house, built in 1950, opens to a swimming pool with a brick surround and a guesthouse. There are distressed wood floors, painted beams and a living room with a fireplace. The home, set behind gates on slightly more than a quarter-acre, hit the market in July 2019 for about $7 million and sold in roughly five weeks. The current owner is actor Jonah Hill.

Jean (1929-2010) had been placed on an Islington Council list for a possible blue plaque but, alas, there were insufficient public votes, which, frankly, I find incredible. Yet, perhaps, not really when one considers how, sadly, London has changed out of all recognition in every possible way imaginable.

Amanda Nevill, CEO of the British Film Institute (who had attended Jean’s memorial service in London) was contacted in August 2018 to suggest a Jean Simmons retrospective and the unveiling of a plaque. Misss Nevill referred the matter to English Heritage Blue Plaques, but they declined as the subject had to be deceased for at least twenty years. In May 2019, radio DJ Mike Read of the British Plaque Trust was contacted, who initially expressed interest in the project. Unfortunately, he did not respond to subsequent e-mails. Consequently, the Theatre and Film Guild of Great Britain and America were contacted and pledged a significant donation towards the cost of erecting a plaque.

Jean was born at 42 Hillmarton Road, Holloway, London, ten minutes' walk from my parents' home, in January 1929 to physical training instructor Charles Simmons and Winifred Ada Loveland.

In 1932, the Simmons family moved to 120 Cheviot Gardens, on the new Golders Green Estate in Cricklewood. The family was evacuated to Winscombe in Somerset for a period during the Blitz years of the Second World War. Jean Simmons attended Orange Hill School for Girls in Edgware for a time.

It was in 1943, a fortnight after she had begun to attend the Aida Foster school of dance and drama (my wife graduated in dance and drama) in nearby Golders Green, that she was chosen by producer and director Val Guest to appear in the film Give Us the Moon (1944), an auspicious year for me.

A brilliant “natural” actress, Jean went on to star along with most of the great actors and directors in Great Britain and Hollywood. In 1950, she had followed her future first husband, actor Stewart Granger, to Hollywood and they were married in Tucson, Arizona. Ten years later she married film director and producer Richard Brooks. Like her first marriage, this second one also ended in divorce.

This stunningly beautiful lady, much-loved and admired by fellow actors, directors, producers, and legions of adoring film fans world-wide, died at her home in Santa Monica aged eighty, on 22 January 2010. Her ashes were interred in the famous Highgate Cemetery West where many celebrated folk also rest in tombs. The western part, of course, became associated with the supernatural in the twentieth century about which I have written, and discussed in multifarious television programmes. 

One last fact that interestingly connects Jean Simmons to myself is that she died on Byron's birthday.