Jennifer Jones

Biography

Jennifer Jones (born Phylis Lee Isley; March 2, 1919 – December 17, 2009), also known as Jennifer Jones Simon, was an American actress and mental-health advocate. Over the course of her career that spanned more than five decades, she was nominated for an Academy Award five times, including one win for Best Actress, and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama. A native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Jones worked as a model in her youth before transitioning to acting, appearing in a western and serial in 1939. She remained off the screen until 1943. Her third role was a lead part as Bernadette Soubirous in The Song of Bernadette (1943), which earned her the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Actress. She went on to star in several films that garnered her significant critical acclaim and a further three Academy Award nominations in the mid-1940s, including Since You Went Away (1944), Love Letters (1945) and Duel in the Sun (1946). In 1949, Jones married film producer David O. Selznick and appeared as the eponymous Madame Bovary in Vincente Minnelli's 1949 adaptation. She appeared in several films throughout the 1950s, including Ruby Gentry (1952), John Huston's adventure comedy Beat the Devil (1953) and Vittorio De Sica's drama Terminal Station (1953). Jones earned her fifth Academy Award nomination for her performance as a Eurasian doctor in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955). After Selznick's death in 1965, Jones married industrialist Norton Simon and entered semi-retirement. She made her final film appearance in The Towering Inferno (1974), a performance which earned her a nomination for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture. Jones suffered from mental-health problems during her life. After her 22-year-old daughter, Mary Jennifer Selznick, took her own life in 1976, Jones became deeply involved in mental health education. In 1980, she founded the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation for Mental Health and Education. Jones enjoyed a quiet retirement, living the last six years of her life in Malibu, California, where she died of natural causes in 2009 at the age of 90.

== Biography ==

=== 1919–1939: Early life === Phylis Lee Isley was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on March 2, 1919, the daughter of Flora Mae (née Suber) and Phillip Ross Isley. Her father was originally from Georgia, and her mother was a native of Sacramento, California. She was an only child, and she was raised Catholic. Her parents, both aspiring stage actors, toured the Midwest in a traveling tent show that they owned and operated. Jones accompanied them, performing on occasion as part of the Isley Stock Company.

In 1925, Isley enrolled at Edgemere Public School in Oklahoma City, then attended Monte Cassino, a Catholic girls school and junior college in Tulsa. After graduating, she enrolled as a drama major at Northwestern University in Illinois, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority before transferring to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City in September 1937. It was there that she met and fell in love with fellow acting student Robert Walker, a native of Ogden, Utah, and left school. They married on January 2, 1939. By the 1930s her father, Phil Isley, ran a chain of movie theaters in Texas, and was influential in her early dramatic career. Mr. and Mrs. Walker returned to Tulsa for a 13-week radio program arranged by her father and then moved to Hollywood. It is quite possible that he arranged for his daughter's screen contract with the small independent studio Republic Pictures. Under her maiden name of Phylis Isley, she played ingenues in a Three Mesquiteers western New Frontier, filmed in the summer of 1939 for Republic Pictures. Her second project was the serial Dick Tracy's G-Men (1939), also for Republic. The 20-year-old hopeful made little impression and Republic did not extend her contract. After failing a screen test for Paramount Pictures, she became disenchanted with Hollywood and returned to New York City.

=== 1940–1948: Career beginnings === Shortly after her marriage, she gave birth to two sons: Robert Walker Jr. (1940–2019), and Michael Walker (1941–2007). While Walker found steady work in radio programs, Isley worked part-time modeling hats for the Powers Agency, and posing for Harper's Bazaar while looking for acting jobs. When she learned of auditions for the lead role in Rose Franken's hit play Claudia in the summer of 1941, she presented herself to David O. Selznick's New York office but fled in tears after what she thought was a bad reading. However, Selznick had overheard her audition and was impressed enough to have his secretary call her back. Following an interview, she was signed to a seven-year contract.

She was carefully groomed for stardom and given a new name: Jennifer Jones. Director Henry King was impressed by her screen test as Bernadette Soubirous for The Song of Bernadette (1943), and she won the coveted role over hundreds of applicants. In 1944, on her 25th birthday, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Bernadette, her third screen role. Simultaneously to her rise in prominence for The Song of Bernadette, Jones began an affair with producer Selznick. She separated from Walker in November 1943, co-starred with him in Since You Went Away (1944), and formally divorced him in June 1945. For her performance in Since You Went Away, she was nominated for her second Academy Award, this time for Best Supporting Actress. She earned a third successive Academy Award nomination for her performance with Joseph Cotten in Love Letters (1945). Jones's saintly image from her first starring role was starkly contrasted three years later when she was cast as a biracial woman in Selznick's controversial Duel in the Sun (1946), in which she portrayed a mixed-race indigenous (mestiza) orphan in Texas who falls in love with a white man (Gregory Peck). Also in 1946, she starred as the title character in Ernst Lubitsch's romantic comedy Cluny Brown as a working-class English woman who falls in love just before World War II. She next appeared in the fantasy film Portrait of Jennie (1948), again costarring with Cotten. The film was based on the novella of the same name by Robert Nathan. However, it was a commercial failure, grossing only $1.5 million against a $4 million budget.

=== 1949–1964: Marriage to Selznick ===

Jones married Selznick at sea on July 13, 1949, en route to Europe after a five-year relationship. Over the following two decades, she appeared in numerous films that he produced, and they established a working relationship. In 1949, Jones starred opposite John Garfield in John Huston's adventure film We Were Strangers. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times felt that Jones's performance was lacking, noting: "There is neither understanding nor passion in the stiff, frigid creature she achieves." She was subsequently cast as the title character of Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary (1949), a role originally intended for Lana Turner that Turner declined. Variety deemed the film "interesting to watch, but hard to feel," although it noted that "Jones answers to every demand of direction and script." In 1950, Jones starred in the Powell and Pressburger-directed fantasy Gone to Earth as a superstitious gypsy woman in the English countryside. Jones next starred in William Wyler's drama Carrie (1952) with Laurence Olivier. Crowther criticized her performance, writing: "Mr. Olivier gives the film its closest contact with the book, while Miss Jones' soft, seraphic portrait of Carrie takes it furthest away." Also in 1952, she costarred with Charlton Heston in Ruby Gentry, playing a femme fatale in rural North Carolina who becomes embroiled in a murder conspiracy after marrying a local man. The role was previously offered to Joan Fontaine, who felt that she was "unsuited to play backwoods." In its review, Variety deemed the film a "sordid drama [with] neither Jennifer Jones nor Charlton Heston gaining any sympathy in their characters."