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Girl from the Suburbs. Jean Simmons has lived in Golders Green, a suburb of London, since she was a year old. Rank's publicists like to emphasize this honest supersuburbanity. Jean's grandfather was a music-hall artist who took great care that his children should stay off the stage. Her father won third prize (in Gymnastics) at the 1912 Olympics; the certificate still hangs proudly in the hall. When Jean was 14 her mother started her in a dancing school conducted by a Miss Aida Foster. Miss Foster took one look at the child, and had a little talk with her mother. Lying about her age, Jean promptly landed the first movie role she ever tried for, or dreamed of: as Margaret Lockwood's twelve-year-old sister in Give Us the Moon. (Miss Foster has been collecting an agent's percentage ever since.)
During the next couple of years Jean played small roles in such films as Mr. Emmanuel and Caesar and Cleopatra. Dancing, however, still looked like her real profession, and at 16 she earned her license as a teacher. But just then she got her first big chance, as the haughty young Estella in Great Expectations. Soon after, she appeared as a speechless but physically eloquent native girl in Black Narcissus.
Olivier and his friends began, still half-consciously, to think of her as Ophelia. David Lean, who directed Great Expectations, helped out by telling them how quickly she caught on to direction. But by then Jean was so heavily scheduled for minor movies that Olivier had to wheedle her away from Boss Rank by special dispensation.
Hamlet was the absolute news to Jean Simmons that it is to most people who "had to read it once in school." Olivier and Molly Terraine explained it to her line by line, in terms that she could understand. (When they came to Hamlet's That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs, and asked her if she knew what it meant, she replied, with embarrassment, that she supposed it was like when people are married.) Much of this touching sense of the newness, strangeness and beauty of the over-familiar lines helped Jean to make them sound new and living on the screen.
To Fresh Woods. We know what we are, the mad Ophelia says, in one of the most bemusing lines in the play; but know not what we may be. It is clear to Olivier, as to many others, that Jean Simmons is "an exceptionally bright and promising actress." It is not so clear what she may become. Olivier offered her the chance of a lifetime: a modest and gradual seasoning, first in minor roles, then in larger ones, at the Old Vic in Bristol. There is probably no more propitious training ground for legitimate acting in the English-speaking world. However, Jean has signed a fiveyear, million-dollar contract with J. Arthur Rank. She will next appear in The Blue Lagoon, in which she wears a sarong, and dies, after having an illegitimate baby in a rowboat, somewhere in the South Pacific.