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Jean Simmons was born in London, England in 1929. When she was just 14 she got her first movie role and after some minor parts over the next two years she was Young Estella in David Lean's Great Expectations, and that led to much bigger and better roles. The next year she was in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus, the following year she was Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for this film), and the following year she was the girl stranded on a desert island in The Blue Lagoon. She was under contract to Rank, but they sold her contract to eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes in 1950, and she also then married actor Stewart Granger, who was 16 years older than her, and had appeared in Caesar and Cleopatra with her when she was just 16, and again in Adam and Evelyne when she was 20 (which oddly enough, was a movie about a man in his thirties who falls in love with a teenager). Hughes really had no clue what to do with her, but she did make the excellent film noir Angel Face, directed by Otto Preminger. But her other roles for Hughes were so lackluster that she sued to be let out of her contract and won, and remained independent the rest of her career, so she could never again be forced to make a lesser movie. In the later 1950s she appeared in many major Hollywood productions, but the two that stand out the most for me are as Sergeant Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls, and as Julie Maragon in The Big Country. In 1960 she was at the top of her stardom, but husband's Stewart Granger's career was on the skids, and they divorced, and she immediately re-married director Richard Brooks (who was 17 years her senior) and she starred in his adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry, as Sister Sharon Falconer, and that same year she starred opposite Kirk Douglas in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, and also found time to co-star in Stanley Donen's romantic comedy The Grass Is Greener! That was the peak of her career, but she continued acting for decades in films such as Happy Ending (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), before passing away on January 22, 2010, just shy of her 81st birthday.

Important Added Info: Note that this REPRODUCTION still has been personally autographed (signed) by Jean Simmons!

Note that this autographed item is part of a remarkable collection. In our last two all-signed auctions, we auctioned hundreds of items from this collection and now we are auctioning 213 more items (plus signed index cards that have a different note on those)!
     In the 1970s, our consignor was a teacher who taught a film class, and he also part-time ran the local movie theater (and he saved all the presskits from the movies the theater showed).
     Starting in the late 1970s through the late 1980s, he wrote to famous celebrities, and enclosed an 8x10 from his collection, and he wrote a literate personalized letter, talking about his work as a film teacher, and discussing his favorite movie by that star.
     He received signed photos back from a good percentage of the people he wrote to, and if the people simply sent him a stock photo back, he did not save it, but if he felt the autograph was genuine, and if they added a personalized note, then he did save them.
     In the late 1980s, he pretty much stopped sending letters and photos, simply because he was just too busy. So this photo (and the vast majority of the other photos we are auctioning for this consignor) were obtained in the late 1970s or 1980s, through personal correspondence with this star. This is of course excellent, because back at that time celebrities were not selling their signatures nearly as much, and many of the stars were pretty forgotten and were happy to get letters from people like our consignor!
     He of course does not have any "Certificates of Authenticity", but he only kept ones he felt were surely authentic, and those are the ones we are auctioning. However, bidders can certainly compare the signatures to known examples on the internet to judge for themselves.

As is true of all the signed items we are currently auctioning, we give every buyer 30 days in which to review what they purchased and they can return any item as long as it is within 30 days of the end of the auction. On non-signed items, we give a "lifetime guarantee" on everything we auction, but on signed items, we give the above modified guarantee of 30 days after the auction closes.

Our address for UPS or FedEx only is:
Bruce Hershenson,
306 Washington Avenue, West Plains, MO 65775