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Production designer behind the deadly gadgets used by James Bond – and his foes

The production designer Syd Cain, who has died aged 93, was one of many behind-the-scenes professionals elevated to something like prominence by the worldwide interest in the James Bond films. An industry veteran who began work in British cinema as a draughtsman in 1947, contributing to the look of the gothic melodrama Uncle Silas, Cain is credited on a range of film and television projects, but remains best known for his work in various design capacities on the 007 series, from Dr No in 1962 to GoldenEye in 1995.

Born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, Cain served in the armed forces in the second world war, surviving a plane crash and recovering from a broken back. Working at Denham Studios in Buckinghamshire in the 1940s and 50s, he moved up from uncredited draughtsman (on Adam and Evelyne, The Interrupted Journey, You Know What Sailors Are...

Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Hamlet Star of the Month Jean Simmons is back on Turner Classic Movies this Tuesday evening, with five more films. Like last week, these are all from Simmons' British period: Trio, featuring three stories by W. Somerset Maugham; the thriller So Long at the Fair; Adam and Evelyne, which paired Simmons with future husband Stewart Granger; Laurence Olivier's Best Picture Oscar winner Hamlet; and Gabriel Pascal's film version of George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. In Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) Simmons has what amounts to a bit part as a harp player. Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh are the capable [...]...

British-born film star known for her roles in Great Expectations and Spartacus

Jean Simmons, who has died aged 80, had a bounteous moment, early in her career, when she seemed the likely casting for every exotic or magical female role. It passed, as she got out of her teens, but then for the best part of 15 years, in Britain and America, she was a valued actress whose generally proper, if not patrician, manner had an intriguing way of conflicting with her large, saucy eyes and a mouth that began to turn up at the corners as she imagined mischief – or more than her movies had in their scripts. Even in the age of Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor, she was an authentic beauty. And there were always hints that the lady might be very sexy. But nothing worked out smoothly, and it is somehow typical of Simmons that her most astonishing...

Philip French pays tribute to the Rank Organisation starlet who went on to become one of Hollywood's most luminous actresses

Jean Simmons, who has died at the age of 80 of lung cancer in Santa Monica, California, was among the finest, most beautiful British movie actresses of the postwar years. She was one of only two from that great 1940s flourishing of our native industry under J Arthur Rank to become a major star in Hollywood; the other was Deborah Kerr, with whom she twice appeared.

Born in 1929, the daughter of a gym teacher who had represented Britain in the 1912 Olympics, she grew up in Crickle­wood, north London, of which she once disloyally remarked: "No Cricklewood girl would ever admit to being from there." She got a deal of work as a child actress, without becoming a child star (her most memorable early appearance is singing at a forces concert...