Jennifer Jones: Actress, Dead at 90...

Jennifer Jones
(March 2, 1919 – December 17, 2009)




Jennifer Jones was an American actress. A five-time Academy Award nominee, Jones won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Song of Bernadette (1943).

Jones was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the daughter of Phil and Flora Mae Isley, who ran a travelling theatre. She toured with her parents as a child in vaudeville tent shows. Her first stage role, playing a peppermint candy, was at the age of five.

Her father hoped she would become a lawyer, but she persuaded him to let her attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where she met and married her first husband, the actor Robert Walker. They travelled to Hollywood.

Hollywood publicised her as an overnight discovery, though this was not strictly true. She had first tried her hand there four years earlier under her real name, Phylis Isley, playing opposite John Wayne in a B picture, New Frontier, and in a small role in the serial Dick Tracy's G-Men (both 1939).

Thanks to her early success, she enjoyed a reputation as a "heavyweight" actress, that got her dramatic roles. There were those who felt that she rarely measured up to them, and that parts in Madame Bovary (1949), Gone to Earth (1950), Carrie (1952) and Tender Is the Night (1962) allegedly exposed her limitations.

She starred in two comedy films, yet they were among her most accomplished work. Cluny Brown (1946), which she made for Ernst Lubitsch and John Huston's Beat the Devil (1954).

It was often stated that Jones was a manufactured star. Two of her three husbands were millionaires. David O Selznick, whom she married in 1949, was a celebrated Hollywood tycoon who had made Gone with the Wind (1950). He took personal charge of her career, casting her in his own pictures and leasing her services to others as a prime attraction. With Selznick's death in 1965, her acting career petered out. She made only three more films, with long intervals between them. The last, The Towering Inferno (1974), offered her only a cameo role as one of those trapped on the upper floors of a burning skyscraper.

In 1971, Jones married her second tycoon – the multi-millionaire industrialist Norton Simon.

With Robert Walker, Jones had two sons – Michael, who predeceased her, and Robert Walker Jr, who also became an actor. Her daughter, Mary Selznick, died aged 21 in 1976.

Jones enjoyed a quiet retirement in Southern California close to her son, Robert. She granted no interviews and rarely appeared in public. She died of natural causes at her home.

RIP

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