A few nights ago in the shower, I was washing my hair and wondering if Sheila Sim was still alive.

I just checked. As of almost exactly a month ago, she isn't.

I hadn't known that she and Richard Attenborough had starred in the original production of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap (1952), much less that their pay was a ten percent share of the profits—the kind of deal actors get offered when no one thinks the play will still be running six decades later. I had known that she lost family in the tsunami in 2004. She was the last of the four stars of A Canterbury Tale (1944) still living. Alison Smith the London land girl was not the only role in which I turned out to have seen her, but it's the one I can't see her without. She knows time and the land, Roman roads and Belgian coins, and she is not afraid of living in the present. She can hear the pilgrims' bells on the wind. She can look a man in the eye and tell him not to exclude her from the earthquake of history. She changes lives and she gets her miracle. I don't know the places in Sim's life that were as important to her as the bend in the pilgrims' road above Chillingbourne was to Alison, so I end up picturing her there, in the numinous countryside. If not a geologist with a caravan, I hope there was an actor there to meet her.