Cast as on-screen lovers Young Bess (Queen Elizabeth I) and Sir Thomas Seymour, in real life
Jean Simmons and
Stewart Granger were married to each other when this movie was filmed. Granger (né James Stewart) and Simmons met in 1946 while working on the picture
Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). They would meet again over a year later, with Simmons now a grown up 18. The relationship soon turned to romance, and the couple appeared in a film together in 1949 that reflected their own situation. In
Adam and Evalyn (1949), Granger plays a man in love with a younger woman. A few years later, after divorcing his first wife, Granger and Jean married on December 20, 1950. He was 27. The bride was 21. They also appeared together in
Footsteps in the Fog (1955).
Simmons said of her scenes with Granger in Young Bess, "I feel more self-conscious about playing love scenes with him now, than I did before we were man and wife." But the chemistry flourished on screen.
