Jean Simmons, love-interest of Spartacus

A friend from Rome rings to congratulate me on the final arrival of On the Spartacus Road. He doesn't mean my new book - which I may have to encourage him more sharply to buy - but on the reviews of it by Tom Holland in the Spectator (sadly, not online) which is his weekly print-fix from London and in The Scotsman (which does arrive on his computer). He also thinks I should take advantage of Jean Simmons' death to blog about Spartacus the movie and tell more about how a slave girl from Britain, played by Simmons from Britain, became one of the stranger elements even of a film as strange as Kubrick's.

 I said I might struggle with that, never being much of a film historian and with a knowledge of the movie which while going back to sixties schooldays did not progress very far. The film also plays only a small part in the book. I did watch it once on my Spartacus Road in a narrow alley in Modena on a bootleg-seller's TV where every colour, including that of Simmons' famous eyes, was a swirl of chemical yellows. And I played the same DVD again in a brick-tower overlooking the Messina Straits where, thanks to a bigger screen, the love-interest (in many ways the main interest) of the movie was somewhat easier to understand. Simmons herself, I discover today from the obits, felt that she had a certain experience of slavery, being bought and sold around the Hollywood Studios 'like a piece of meat'. Like many former slaves in the city from where my friend sent his note today, she did very well for herself, drank too much at various times but lived to a generous eight decade age. R.I.P.

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

One obituary says Jean Simmons was treated disdainfully by Howard Hughes, the film magnate who in later years became a reclusive, at whose behest Otto Preminger, the director, put her through take after take, until Robert Mitchum, playing opposite her, became so enraged that he slugged Preminger.

[Susanne]

The Spectator review is now online at
http://www.spectator.co.uk/print/books/5718503/fighting-spirit.thtml

[Dave Lull]

For Bruce Bawer's tribute to Miss Simmons, his "Memo from Europe" for Sunday, January 24, 2010, see here:

http://memo.brucebawer.com/