Jean Simmons looked around the splendour of Bradford's Midland Hotel and said: "The memories are coming back. We filmed in a room here, and the ballroom. I'm looking forward to seeing that again. And the station, too."

It seemed almost cruel to tell her that while the ballroom was as magnificent as ever, Forster Square Station had been shrunk and transported half a mile up the track since 1965 when she was last in this city filming Life at the Top with Laurence Harvey.

"Oh dear," she said, opening wide those eyes which are as bewitching as ever. "Maybe I shouldn't try to go back."

Her pleasant memories of Bradford are based on the weeks she spent here filming Bingley novelist John Braine's sequel to the book that made his name, Room at the Top.

"It was such a happy group to work with," she recalled. "Laurence - he was so funny - and Honor Blackman, and director Ted Kotcheff. You become like a family when you're on location."

Life at the Top is one of ten films being screened during the Bradford Film Festival next week as a Jean Simmonds retrospective, the reason for the California-based actress's presence in the city this weekend. She was a guest at the festival dinner last night and this evening will be "In Conversation" about her career with festival director Tony Earnshaw at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television.

Surprisingly, this is the first occasion in her 74 years that she has been honoured in this way by any organisation.

"It came out of the blue," she said. "I was in retirement in Santa Monica, doing nothing. I'm thrilled about it. It means a great deal to me, the fact that I was remembered."

Then hard on the heels of the invitation to appear at the Bradford Film Festival came her New Year Honour - an OBE in rather belated recognition for her work in a string of classic movies, among them Spartacus, Great Expectations, The Robe and Guys and Dolls.

Talking to Jean Simmons is to establish a link with Hollywood of the past. Names drop from her lips without a hint of affectation.

"I never intended to live in the United States," she said. "It just worked out that way. My contract was sold by Rank to Howard Hughes. And then I married Mr Granger. Stewart Granger," she explains, unnecessarily. That was in 1950, and she's lived in America ever since then, though she nurses a desire to return to this country where her daughter Kate now lives.

Her leading men, over the decades since her career began in the 1940s, have included Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Dirk Bogarde, John Mills, Gregory Peck, Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston, Richard Burton, Victor Mature...

But asked who was the greatest actor she had ever worked with, she said without hesitation: "Spencer Tracy. He was a good chum as well."