Jean Simmons spent the early part of her career being regarded as a great screen beauty. Which makes it even more ironic that she's spent the past few years being heard rather than seen.
"Honestly, I'm just flattered that I'm still getting offers at my age," the 76-year-old actress said by phone from her home in Santa Monica, Calif.
Simmons' career stretches back to the early 1940s. Her first film role was in the 1944 British production "Give Us the Moon." She's spent the past decade in what she calls a state of semi-retirement.
"I only come out to play every once in a while," she said. "That doesn't mean I've completely given up on my acting career. It just means that you never know when or where you'll see me . . . or hear me."
Most recently, Simmons has been the voice-over narrator for the television shows "Ancient Mysteries" and "Mysteries of the Bible," and she voiced a character in the 2001 computer-animated feature "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within."
Her latest project is "Howl's Moving Castle," an animated feature based on the popular young-adult novel by Diana Wynne Jones. Simmons called it "a wonderful meditation on aging, love and war."
Then she asked, "Oh, can you tell that I just had a wonderful time being involved with this one? This is one of my proudest moments in film, especially in the last little while."
Simmons and 33-year-old British actress Emily Mortimer actually split time as the voice of Sophie, a young hatmaker who's been cursed by an evil witch. She now finds herself aged 90 years, and only the wizard Howl (voiced by Christian Bale) can lift that curse. (Obviously, Simmons voices the older version of Sophie.)
"Howl's Moving Castle" comes from animator/director Hayao Miyazaki, whose Studio Ghibli is responsible for "Princess Mononoke" and the Oscar-winning "Spirited Away." He has a reputation as "the Walt Disney of Japan."
This film was Simmons' first encounter with his "wonderful" work. "Hopefully it won't be the last. He is the nicest, most polite and soft-spoken man. And he has the most amazing imagination."
Simmons continued to lavish praise on Miyazaki, though she never really worked with him on the film. The production on "Howl's" was finished in Japan, using a Japanese voice cast. However, for the film's U.S. release, Pixar's Pete Docter ("Monsters, Inc.") supervised the English-language dubbing. "Dubbing takes a lot of concentration," Simmons said. "You're reading from a script while you're trying to match mouth movements, vocal inflections and facial expressions."
To top that off, Simmons was playing what she calls a "second-hand role." "I inherited it from not only from a Japanese actress (Chieko Baisho) but from Emily as well. That left me feeling a little odd."
Speaking of Mortimer, she and Simmons met recently at the film's New York premiere. "Emily is such a young, lovely girl. I think she even looks a bit like I did when I was her age. At least that's how I'd like to remember myself."
That event also allowed Simmons to catch up with an old friend, Lauren Bacall, who provides the voice for the Witch of the Waste in the film. "I had such a tremendous time out there catching up with Betty (Bacall). I hadn't really seen her since the Bogie days, and she's always such a hoot."
Over the course of 60-plus years, Simmons has worked with plenty of great actors — Kirk Douglas in "Spartacus," Burt Lancaster in "Elmer Gantry," Cary Grant and Robert Mitchum in "The Grass Is Greener," Laurence Olivier in the 1948 version of "Hamlet." For the latter film, she received the first of two Academy Award nominations (the second was for "The Happy Ending").
She said her career has been successful enough to afford her a comfortable "semi-retirement." "I only do things that really interest me now, which is a luxury I sometimes wish I'd had when I was younger."
Simmons will next be heard as a voice in another animated film, "Thru the Moebius Strip," alongside science-fiction veteran Mark Hamill.
"And I'm hoping that sometime soon I'll be in a project where I actually get to see my co-stars — and that everyone will get to see me," she said with a laugh.
E-mail: jeff@desnews.com