Jean Simmons, the demure British beauty was born January 31, 1929, in Crouch End, London. A 14 year old dance student plucked from her school to play Margaret Lockwood's precocious sister in Give Us the Moon (1944), Simmons went on to make a name for herself in such major British productions as Caesar and Cleopatra (1946), Great Expectations (also 1946, as the spoiled, selfish Estella), Black Narcissus (also 1946, as a sultry native beauty), Hamlet (1948, playing Ophelia to Laurence Olivier's great Dane and earning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination), The Blue Lagoon (1949), and So Long at the Fair (1950), among others.In 1950, Jean married actor Stewart Granger and that same year starred in the Sinatra musical "Guys and Dolls" (1955); Jean used her own singing voice and earned her first Golden Globe Award. 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 (1960), a memorable adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel. That same year she costarred with Kirk Douglas in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus and played a would-be home-wrecker opposite Cary Grant in The Grass Is Greener.Off the screen for a few years, she 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." After that, however, she found quality projects somewhat harder to come by. Life at the Top (1965), Mister Buddwing (1966), Divorce American Style, Rough Night in Jericho (both 1967), The Happy Ending (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 mainly appeared in TV mini-series, such as "North and South" and "The Thorn Birds." Jean made a comeback to films in 1995 in "How to Make an American Quilt" co-starring Winona Ryder and Anne Bancroft and most recently played the elderly Sophie in the English version of Hayao Miyazaki's Howls Moving Castle. She now resides in Santa Monica, California with her dog Mr. Gates and her 2 cats Adisson and Megan.