Born in London in 1929, Jean Simmons emerged as a British teen ingenue in David Lean s Great Expectations (1946) and Laurence Olivier s Hamlet (1948), for which she was Oscar-nominated. She crossed to Hollywood in the 1950s, starring in The Robe (1953), Guys and Dolls (1955) opposite Marlon Brando, William Wyler s The Big Country (1958), and Elmer Gantry (1960). Stanley Kubrick cast her as the enslaved Varinia in Spartacus (1960), one of her most enduring roles. Elegant and understated, she embodied a very particular strain of transatlantic classical Hollywood glamour into the 1970s and beyond. Read more