Neil Anthony Porteous Simmons was born in Lusaka, then in Northern Rhodesia, on December 29 1952. His father, William Simmons, was a British diplomat and his mother Barbara, née Porteous, was South African. After spending most of his early childhood in South Africa, he boarded at a prep school in Surrey and subsequently at Cranleigh School.
He began his training when he was 19, working initially in architectural sculpture as a carver at Chichester Cathedral and subsequently St Paul’s; he went on to complete an apprenticeship in Italy, and then to work at the sculpture studio attached to the Department of the Environment.
In 1972 he married Sally Bolt, the daughter of the playwright Robert Bolt, but in 1982 she was killed in a car crash, when their daughter was three. “I became very reclusive and didn’t want to see anybody for a long time,” he recalled in 2003; however, he eventually enjoyed a happy second marriage to the artist Emma de Bendern, with whom he lived in a former sweatshop in Spitalfields which they had converted, and later in a restored Georgian farmhouse at the foot of the Quantock Hills, where he built a studio in one of the outbuildings.
In the 1990s Simmons carved new versions of some of the more weatherbeaten of the Pietro Francavilla statues at Hampton Court, reproducing the intricately detailed flowing robes and tousled hair of the originals with astonishing fidelity. Simon Thurley, who was then Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, recalled their trips to the Carrara marble quarries of Italy, where Simmons, with a flair for dealing with people that matched his feeling for stone, would persuade the Italians to overcome their reluctance to hand over their best stone to an Englishman.
Their daytime trips would be followed by enjoyable nights in Italian restaurants, with Simmons usually covered in quarry dust. Thurley also recalled that the charming, softly spoken Simmon was extremely attractive: “The female curators utterly melted when he walked into the room.”
His other commissions over his busy 50-year career ranged from two of the Christian martyr sculptures above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey to a bust of Nigel Farage. His grave memorial to Diana, Princess of Wales – a Doric-style temple – is sited on the edge of the Round Oval lake at Althorp (on an island in the middle of which the Princess is buried) and has become a site of pilgrimage for visitors.
Simmons also taught for many years at Chelsea College of Art and Design and at City and Guilds of London Art School.
His wife Emma survives him with their four children, his daughter from his first marriage and a son from another relationship.
Neil Simmons, born December 29 1952, died September 19 2026