Jean Simmons: a life in pictures

Jean Simmons, pictured here in May 1959, has died in Santa Monica, California. Two years after being plucked from a dance studio, she was catapulted to film stardom as Estella in David Lean's Great Expectations when she was only 17 and went on to light up the screen opposite some of Hollywood's greatest leading men
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Jean Simmons in her breakthrough role as the wilful, destructive young Estella in David Lean's classic 1946 film of Great Expectations, opposite Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham and Anthony Wager as Young Pip. In 1989, Simmons herself played Miss Havisham in a TV adaptation
Photograph: Allstar

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger chose Jean Simmons to play the temple dancer Kanchi in Black Narcissus. She starred opposite Deborah Kerr, her fellow graduate from J Arthur Rank ranks in the 1940s to make it big in Hollywood
Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

Jean Simmons received her first Oscar nomination, for best supporting actress, for her role as Ophelia opposite Laurence Olivier in his Hamlet (1948). It was said that Olivier's wife at the time, an anxious Vivien Leigh, chose to be on set whenever Simmons was working, just in case
Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

After marrying Stewart Granger, 16 years her senior, in 1950, Jean Simmons set off with him to Hollywood. Here, Simmons (far left) is seen with Jane Russell, Granger, and American gossip columnist Hedda Hopper at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles in 1953
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Jean Simmons's Hollywood career was almost stillborn, a victim of Howard Hughes's obsession. But upon breaking free in 1952, she starred in a run of costume dramas, including playing a young milliner infatuated with Napoleon (Marlon Brando) in Désirée in 1954
Photograph: Rex Features

She sang onscreen in her role as the missionary Sarah Brown with Marlon Brando (far left) as Sky Masterson, Frank Sinatra (third from left) as Nathan Detroit and Vivian Blaine as Miss Adelaide in Joseph L Mankiewicz's 1955 film of the stage musical Guys and Dolls. The producer, Sam Goldwyn, had wanted Grace Kelly, but Mankiewicz insisted on Simmons
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Jean Simmons in 1954. By that year, she had also played opposite such Hollywood heavyweights as Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum and Victor Mature in films that, to some extent, underused her talents
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In 1958, she played a schoolteacher trying to protect her valuable patch of land from the attentions of two rival families, before giving in to Gregory Peck's New Englander, in William Wyler's western The Big Country
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She played the evangelist Sister Sharon Falconer, who comes under the influence of Burt Lancaster's fast-talking, hard-drinking travelling salesman, in the 1960 film Elmer Gantry, written and directed by her new husband Richard Brooks. Lancaster, Brooks and Shirley Jones (as the jilted temptress who returns to haunt Gantry) won Oscars for their work, but Simmons was not even nominated
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Her last big movie was Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus in 1960, in which she played the invented love interest, the slave Varinia, alongside (clockwise from top left) Peter Ustinov, Laurence Olivier, John Gavin, Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis
Photograph: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis

Jean Simmons with Richard Brooks at the Academy Awards in 1961. They were married in November 1960 and had one daughter. She also had a daughter with Stewart Granger
Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

From the mid-1970s, after a public battle with alcoholism, she became more known for her television work. She won an Emmy and was nominated for a Golden Globe for her supporting turn in The Thorn Birds, and starred as a southern matriarch in the American civil war miniseries North and South, with (from left) Terri Garber, Patrick Swayze Lewis Smith and Genie Francis
Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

She was often too shy to accept invitations to film festivals, but made an exception for her tribute at the 35th Telluride film festival in August 2008. Her last film roles included lending her voice to Grandma Sophie in the English-language version of the Studio Ghibli animation Howl's Moving Castle and as a dying poet in Shadows in the Sun in 2009
Photograph: Arun Nevader/WireImage/ Getty