Why Jean Simmons Wanted to Kill Howard Hughes?

Welcome Age of Vintage Society. Jean Simmons was very, very good. She played a femme fatale so fraught she could be considered amongst the most challenging in all of noir. But to look at her, you never would have expected it. Why Jean Simmons wanted to kill Howard Hughes? Make sure to watch the video until the end and leave your thoughts in the comments. If you are new here, join our wonderful community by subscribing to the Age of Vintage channel. Jean Simmons was one of the great beauties of British cinema and she had a talent to match. She was the abiding proof that Britain does indeed have talent. Her radiant good looks and rare intelligence make her one of Hollywood's brightest stars in the 50s when she appeared opposite Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls, Gregory Peck in The Big Country and Kirk Douglas in Spartacus. A graceful leading lady of British and American film for over six decades, Jean Simmons was an Oscar-winning actress whose outward fragility belied an emotional power wielded with skill and precision in such films as Great Expectations, Hamlet and countless others. A novice when she made her debut in 1943, she quickly blossomed into a talented dramatic performer under the direction of such noted filmmakers as David Lean. After leaving the UK for America, she starred in a wide variety of features, ranging from musicals like Guys and Dolls to stark dramas like The Happy Ending, directed by her second husband, Richard Brooks. Though her screen appearances diminished in the 1970s, she remained active on television where her star power illuminated productions like the epic miniseries The Thorn Birds. Still active in films and television in her eighth decade, she remained an enduring talent from the golden age of Hollywood cinema. One look at her pretty face in the late 40s and it was easy to see why. She was cute as a button, and plucky and English, with all the trappings of a proper, well-behaved girl. And when she was less well-behaved, as she was as Estella in Lean's Great Expectations, or Ophelia in Olivier's Hamlet, the young Simmons affected an attitude that suggested she knew her wrongnesses were wrong. I know you'll think this naughty, she seemed to say, but, at her cleverest, she could have been Vivien Leigh's kid sister. Jean Simmons 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. The life story of little Jean Simmons sounds like a fairy tale. The youngest of four children, she was born Jean Marilyn Simmons in Crouch Hill. She was just a little schoolgirl in a London suburb, when the big chance came her way to become a film actress. A dream of many little girls, but one that rarely comes true. Jean had no theatrical background whatsoever, and no idea of becoming an actress ever entered her head. Her father was a gymnast who competed in the 1912 Olympics and later coached. She recalled her childhood as happy, though she was devastated when her father suddenly died at the age of 57, when she was only 16. She was evacuated with her sister Edna to Somerset during the war. Edna, who is two years older than Jean, organised dancing classes for the other evacuees and the village children. Jean started attending the lessons, first of all just for fun. She became really interested and in a short while had made such good progress that instead of being a pupil, she was able to help her sister with the teaching. By the time the two girls had returned to London, Jean had decided that she would like to take up a dancing career. Her very understanding mother therefore decided that instead of sending her little girl back to the local private school she had been attending before she went away, she would be sent to a school in Golders Green, where, as well as doing ordinary lessons, children are taught dancing and given a stage training. The principal of the school was immediately impressed by her new pupil. She realised that she had an unusual talent and that her lovely oval face was very photogenic. The result was that when the principal was asked to send a little girl to the studios, Jean was spotted by the writer-director Val Guest, who was looking for a spirited girl to play Margaret Lockwood's He selected Simmons, over 200 hopefuls, launching her movie career. Without even having a test, Jean was given the role, much to her own surprise. Labour laws necessitated that the performer be over 14 years old. She had such an intuitive talent, said Guest, you never had to explain anything to her more than once. She did not expect to be very good in the part, for she had never thought of playing in a film. She did not worry very much, for she said she knew there were many good business opportunities for young girls. Jean's work, however, proved to be so good that other parts rapidly followed. At age 16, she was selected to play the young Estella in Great Expectations, a role that caught the attention of Laurence Olivier, who chose her to play Ophelia in his 1948 screen production of Hamlet. I remember being thrilled because I was earning £5 a day I didn't take it seriously and I didn't expect it to last. I thought I'd get married, have children and lead a normal life. It was only when I worked with David Lean on Great Expectations that I began to get the bug. Lean was so exciting to work for and very encouraging, and then I made Hamlet with Laurence Olivier, which was mind-blowing. I had had such a crush on him since Wuthering Heights, and he did not disappoint in person. There was one scene we were doing and he started to giggle in the middle of it. I was totally thrown and thought, Olivier is a giggler. That started me off and created a real bond between us. Although inexperienced in Shakespeare and guided line by line in the role by Olivier, Simmons turned in a remarkable performance. Jean Simmons is extraordinarily enchanting and touching as Ophelia. Starting at a low pitch, she builds to the famous mad scene with authority and eloquence. The reviewer for Time, while admitting that Simmons lacked experience, remarked on her oblique individual beauty and trained dancer's continuous grace, adding that she is the only person in the picture who gives every one of her lines the bloom of poetry and the immediacy of ordinary life. For her performance, Simmons won the Best Actress prize at the Venice Festival and a nomination for an Academy Award. Only 19 years old and the possessor of an important contract with the J. Arthur Rank organisation, it would not have been surprising if all this success had gone to her head. But little Jean Simmons had not altered in the slightest. She still lives with her mother, who is a widow in a small suburban house, and when she is not working at studios, helps with the chores. She loves her family very much and when she gets home from the studio, she rushes into the house and calls, Oh, come on now, this must be made up by the studio publicity department. When somebody once suggested she could afford a bachelor girl flat, she was horrified. Even the thrill of going off to the Fiji Islands was spoiled a little for her because she was homesick. Apart from the time that Jean spends filming, her time is fully occupied. She still takes dancing lessons, is fond of riding and skating and is a keen tennis player. At home, she is always busy. Her energy is inexhaustible. A needlewoman, she is especially interested in embroidery work, although she does a lot of plain sewing as well and makes quite a number of her own clothes. If you want to find her when she is not on the set at the studio, you only have to listen until you hear some swing music, for Jean is a swing fan and wherever her gramophone is, she is usually to be found. She hates the idea of ever being taken for a Bobby Soxer, but she thinks Frank Sinatra has got something and in common with millions of other teenagers, she collects his records. But most of those millions of other teenagers didn't finish up working with Frank Sinatra. Jean did on Guys and Dolls. When she was just 19 and moved to Hollywood in 1950 with first husband Stuart Granger, who was 16 years her senior and already married when they first met, the pair were forced to keep their love secret until 1950 when Simmons and Granger were married in Tucson. The event took place at the home of a lawyer friend of producer and industrialist Howard Hughes, who developed an interest in the young actress that was motivated by his twin interests, profit and attractive actresses. I was too young for it all really, very naive, she revealed. Simmons found herself under contract to the eccentric billionaire, who made sure that her arrival in Hollywood did not go unnoticed. He introduced her to the cream of the movie capital with a party at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Recalling those fond memories, she told, I didn't even know who Howard Hughes was at the time. Then in came Ingrid Bergman, followed by Mylena Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor. As one of the glamorous couples of the 50s, Jean and Stuart would regularly dine out with pals Elizabeth Taylor and her husband Michael Wilding, and think nothing of jetting off to Las Vegas at the drop of a hat. But in terms of career, this was often a frustrating period for Jean. Hughes acquired promising young beauties the way other people capture butterflies and pin them to a page. He wanted to own talent rather than nurture it, and Jean's contract with Hughes made her a virtual slave. He neglected her career and was deaf to the entreaties of others offering her gainful employment. She lost out on the role of the incognito princess in Roman Holiday, which earned a Best Actress Oscar for promising newcomer Audrey Hepburn. In those days, no matter how piercing her glance, there was something morally wholesome in her face. Even as she aged, Simmons retained a girlish roundness to her cheeks and chin, a softness that might have kept her star grounded to Debbie Reynolds' territory if it wasn't for Howard Hughes, who, ironically, she despised. In 1951, Hughes bought out Simmons' contract with the British-based J. Arthur Rank Organisation, intending, despite her protestations, to wring out of his new possession every last day she owed him. There were 18. To make matters worse, Otto Preminger, the director Hughes assigned to the project, was every bit as Austrian as she was English. They clashed almost right away, and as if that wasn't uphill enough, she was to play Diane Tremaine, an unassumingly ladylike psychopathic killer, a part distressingly far from her established range. At least, the psychopathic part was. Granger was so incensed by Hughes' behaviour, he fought a bitter legal battle to secure her release, and thought of going further, confessing to one Hughes biographer that it really would have been simpler if I had killed him. Jean found her own way to fight back. When Hughes finally assigned her a role in Angel Face opposite Robert Mitchum, his controlling nature meant he even wanted to dictate the look of her long brunette locks. She took a pair of scissors and simply started chopping off her fringe, forcing the hairstylist to devise a new look. Hughes eventually got the message, and Jean finally found some roles worthy of her abilities, including the actress opposite Spencer Tracy. Tracy was quite extraordinary, she revealed. He would have these long, long speeches, and when he delivered them, it was as if he were thinking these thoughts and saying the words for the very first time. Jean named her first daughter Tracy Granger in his honour. The fifties were a magical time for her career, singing with Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra in Guys and Dolls, playing a widow who found romance with Paul Newman in Until They Sail, riding the Wild West with Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck in The Big Country, and winning rave reviews for Home Before Dark as a housewife recovering from a mental breakdown. Professionally, Simmons was on top of the world, but personally things weren't so rosy. The marriage to Granger ended in 1960, when she met and fell in love with director Richard Brooks, while making Elmer Gantry with Burt Lancaster. Granger was philosophical, declaring, I don't mind Jean leaving me. It's like a child breaking away from an overprotective parent. But it's the guy she chose that got me. Can you imagine anyone wanting to marry Richard Brooks? Despite her success and A-list status, Jean was no diva, preferring to live quietly in Santa Monica with her two cats and a dog. A far cry from the days when she was voted Britain's favourite actress, maybe, but there's no denying Jean always appreciated her good fortune. I've got some lovely memories, she told. I remember coming back from the Fiji Islands on the Queen Mary, after we'd made The Blue Lagoon. I travelled with Eleanor Roosevelt, and she gave me a bunch of violets. I was so thrilled. I was just 18. I've had a lovely life. Not bad for a kid from Cricklewood. If you liked this video, don't forget to give it a thumbs up, subscribe if you are new here, and if you want to support my work, please visit my Patreon page. Now it is your turn. What do you think about the life and legacy of Jean Simmons? She was to swiftly become one of Hollywood's strongest box office draws.