Actress Jean Simmons Fulfills ‘Great Expectations’ Again

Jean Simmons was 16 when David Lean launched her career in “Great Expectations” in 1946. The public was captivated by this dark-haired English beauty who played Estella, the stuck-up ward of the elderly recluse Miss Havisham.

Forty-three years later, after starring in several dozen movies opposite such leading men as Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Marlon Brando, Simmons has returned to the Charles Dickens classic in a much less glamorous role. She plays the gray-haired, heavily wrinkled Miss Havisham in a six-hour miniseries of “Great Expectations,” airing Sunday, July 10 and 11 on the Disney Channel.

“It’s not what I look like that counts,” says Simmons, a refreshingly outspoken woman who was a great beauty in “Guys and Dolls,” “The Robe” and “Elmer Gantry.” “I’m much more concerned about performance. I did another of these elderly ladies in ‘The Dawning,’ Trevor Howard’s last picture. I looked awful, but it was absolutely right for the part. My manager was appalled.”

Unlike the majority of actresses in her age range, Simmons does not try to hide the passing years. For afternoon tea and cookies in her Santa Monica living room, she wears a white track suit. The trim of the suit matches the color of her short gray hair. When contemplating roles she might like to play, she says with a giggle, “If you hear of anything for middle-aged old bags, let me know.”

Twice-divorced (from actor Stewart Granger and director Richard Brooks) and the mother of two grown daughters, Simmons lives alone with her three dogs. She appears in two or three projects a year. In May, she did a guest spot on “Murder, She Wrote.” A year earlier she reteamed with her “Spartacus” co-star Douglas in NBC’s remake of “Inherit the Wind.”

“Kirk tracked me down at an Irish hotel and said, ‘I know it’s not a big role, but it’s important to me for you to do it,’ ” she says. “I grew very fond of Kirk in ‘Spartacus.’ Some actors you work with, they could be a lamp stand.”

Simmons is not a workaholic. “I’m terribly lazy,” she says. “I’m at a very fortunate stage, touch wood.” She raps on the coffee table. “If there’s something I want to do, I do it. But I don’t have to. I’ve been at it a long time.”

When the offer came to work again in Britain in the Dickens classic that launched her career, she responded: “Why not? On TV we’re able to do so much more of the story than the film could cover. Dickens’ books came out in serial form, so a miniseries should be terrific.”

Also starring Anthony Hopkins, John Rhys-Davies, Anthony Calf, Ray McAnally and Kim Thomson, “Great Expectations” is a typically Dickensian tale of an innocent’s acquisition of wisdom. An orphan named Pip receives a gentleman’s education with help from a mysterious benefactor.

He falls in love with Estella, the young ward of Miss Havisham, a wealthy but embittered woman who was left at the altar on her wedding day and since then has never left her home or taken off her wedding gown. To win Estella, Pip must struggle against the mistrustfulness of men that Miss Havisham has implanted in her. Along the way, he also discovers the identity of his secret benefactor.

“I was surprised to be offered Miss Havisham because I’m not usually thought of for roles like that,” Simmons says. “I’m usually offered poker-up-the-behind parts.” She laughs at the recollection of her playing so many stiff and humorless ladies. “I was in an awful lot of religious pictures. I did a lot of pictures where you stand around and you’re supposed to look pretty. Now it’s getting to be more fun.”

Although “Great Expectations” is set in the 19th Century, Simmons finds sections of it surprisingly relevant today. “There’s this woman who stays in the house and never changes her dress,” she says. “I understood Miss Havisham’s ‘agoraphobia.’ I went through that for a while myself.

“I used to do a lot of walking with my dogs, but all of a sudden I couldn’t go out the front door. I don’t know how it happened. It lasted a couple of years. My friends would come here because they understood it. I did go out to work, and that got me out of the house. Now I’m fine, although I’m still very much of a homebody.”

No longer very well-known to the public, Simmons does not seem bothered in the slightest. She is amused to recount receiving some fan mail meant for Gene Simmons of the rock group Kiss.

“I was reading this letter from a 10-year-old boy,” she recalls. “It was the usual fan letter, saying things like, ‘I think you’re wonderful.’ Then I got to the P.S.: ‘I love it when you spit blood!’ That’s when I realized the letter wasn’t for me.”

However, Simmons has had her share of laudatory fan mail since she accidentally became an actress almost five decades ago.

“When I was 14, I went to a dancing school for two weeks to get my certificate,” she says. “During that period, a casting director came to the school, and I was asked if I would go down and read a few lines. Suddenly I was in a movie (“Give Us the Moon”) and getting paid 5 a day. For two years I had bit parts, and then ‘Great Expectations’ turned up.”

Simmons made such an impression as Estella that Laurence Olivier was determined to cast her as Ophelia in his film version of “Hamlet.”

“I didn’t know anything about Shakespeare then,” she says. “As a child I’d loathed Shakespeare at school because I didn’t have a good teacher. So Larry sent me off to a coach.”

Simmons received an Oscar nomination for “Hamlet” and another nomination 21 years later for “The Happy Ending.”

“God, I’m going to burst into tears,” she says. “I’m going back 47 years. It was extraordinary for a Cockney kid from Cricklewood to have this happen. I’m still amazed by it. If I hadn’t gone to that dancing school, I would have married and had children like my mum and had a normal life.”

Instead, she became an actress, married Granger, one of the top romantic leading men of the time, and moved to Hollywood.

“My career has had a lot of ups and downs, but basically it has been wonderful,” she says.