Have we been a little too quiet about the death of Jean Simmons last weekend? She was never quite as famous as her near- contemporary, Elizabeth Taylor (born three years later in an adjacent section of north London), but a glance at the records proves that she gave stronger performances in better films.

Check out Simmons’s nuanced turns – cleanly spoken, but with a hint of mania – as the spiteful Estella in David Lean’s Great Expectations, an airy Ophelia in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet and a zealot in Richard Brooks’s Elmer Gantry. Best of all, dig out Otto Preminger’s peerless film noir Angel Face. Any notion that Simmons was just another brittle English rose is rapidly dispelled by her performance as an archetypal femme fatale who proves too much even for Robert Mitchum.

She had come a long way from her middle-class roots in the genteel end of Islington. Acting from the age of 14, Simmons, born in 1929, moved to Hollywood in the late 1940s following her triumphs in Hamlet and Great Expectations. As well as racking up a fine array of performances and two Oscar nominations, she managed to bag a couple of celebrity husbands: actor Stewart Granger and director Richard Brooks.

In this area of competition, Simmons, of course, failed

to overtake Taylor. Eight marriages (from seven husbands) is quite a record. And Dame Liz is still with us.