At age 14, soon after she entered the Aida Foster School of Dancing, Simmons was persuaded by a talent scout to audition for what would be her debut film role, in Give Us the Moon In she went to the United States to begin her Hollywood film career, and six years later she became a U. She married the actor Stewart Granger in

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Jean Simmons, the English actress who made the covers of Time and Life magazines by the time she was 20 and became a major midcentury star alongside strong leading men like Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton and Marlon Brando, often playing their demure helpmates, died on Friday at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was Indeed, she rarely found roles to match the talent so many colleagues and critics recognized in her, despite a dazzling start to her career. Plucked out of a dancing-school class at 14, Ms. At the time, however, Ms.
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Jean Simmons, who has died aged 80, had a bounteous moment, early in her career, when she seemed the likely casting for every exotic or magical female role. It passed, as she got out of her teens, but then for the best part of 15 years, in Britain and America, she was a valued actress whose generally proper, if not patrician, manner had an intriguing way of conflicting with her large, saucy eyes and a mouth that began to turn up at the corners as she imagined mischief — or more than her movies had in their scripts. Even in the age of Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor , she was an authentic beauty. And there were always hints that the lady might be very sexy. But nothing worked out smoothly, and it is somehow typical of Simmons that her most astonishing work — in Angel Face — is not very well known.
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