Best Known As: Star of 1943's The Song of Bernadette
Name at birth: Phylis Isley
Jennifer Jones was a top box-office draw and multiple Oscar nominee during the 1940s and '50s, known for her off-screen love affair with producer David O. Selznick as much as for her varied on-screen performances. She grew up in Oklahoma, part of a theatrical family that performed travelling shows. She studied in Chicago briefly and went to New York, where she met her first husband, actor Robert Walker. In Hollywood in the 1940s, Selznick "discovered" her, changed her name from Phylis Isley to Jennifer Jones and molded her career. Her first vehicle, The Song of Bernadette (1943), earned her an Oscar for Best Actress. She went on to be nominated four more times, for Since You Went Away (1944), Love Letters (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946, with Gregory Peck) and Love is a Many Splendored Thing (1955, with William Holden). Off-screen she had an affair with Selznick and the two ended up divorcing their spouses and marrying in 1949. After the mid-1950s her career waned, and in 1965 Selznick died. She went on to marry a third time in 1971, to millionaire art collector Norton Simon. Although her last film was 1974's The Towering Inferno (with Paul Newman and Steve McQueen), she has remained active as an advocate for helping the mentally ill and as a director of the Norton Simon Museum.
(born March 2, 1919, Tulsa, Okla., U.S.) U.S. film actress. She played leads in minor films from 1939 before coming to the notice of David O. Selznick, who cast her in The Song of Bernadette (1943, Academy Award). Selznick continued to choose her roles, and she starred in such films as Love Letters (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946), and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955). She married Selznick in 1949 and appeared in films into the 1960s.
Career Highlights: Since You Went Away, The Song of Bernadette, Ruby Gentry
First Major Screen Credit: The Song of Bernadette (1943)
Biography
Though often overshadowed by some of her female contemporaries as the years passed, Jennifer Jones came to embody one of the preeminent examples of a Hollywood star. With qualities that transcended preternatural beauty, she projected the sort of charisma that cannot be feigned, courting legions of fans in the process, as she graced one film after another with her presence. And then, just as suddenly as she had risen to greatness, Jones dropped out of the limelight and withdrew into anonymity, spending the last several decades of her life well outside of the public eye.
Jennifer Jones began life in Tulsa, OK, as Phyllis Isley, the daughter of vaudeville performers. Ensconced in show business from the beginning, she dreamed of establishing herself as an actress from early childhood. As a young woman, Isley studied at New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts and revealed incredible promise; during that tenure, she also met and grew enchanted with a young actor named Robert Walker; they did summer stock together, fell deeply in love, married, and parented two children, Robert Walker, Jr., and Michael Ross Walker. Then Hollywood beckoned to Isley, first with a supporting role in a Republic western, and then in the form of a talent agent from megaproducer David O. Selznick, the giant responsible for Gone With the Wind. Though the agent sensed greatness from the ingenue's initial reading and arranged a meeting between Isley and Selznick without hesitation, Isley reportedly felt ashamed by the Republic B picture and attempted to obscure its presence. She needn't have worried; the initial meeting between Selznick and Isley (whom he renamed Jennifer Jones) permanently changed both of their lives and made Jones a household name.
For years film historians have speculated (and fans have gossiped) about the initial exchanges that materialized between Jones and Selznick, the history of their relationship, and some of the tragedies surrounding it. Many of the exact details will never be known, but readily apparent were Selznick's vision of Jones as his next great star, Jones' decision to leave and then divorce Walker and marry Selznick, and Walker's understandable difficulty in handling these events. By all accounts an emotionally fragile individual (though an incredibly kind and sensitive one), Walker himself moved to Hollywood and experienced a brief period of stardom that peaked with a lead role in Hitchcock's 1951 Strangers on a Train, but he could never quite emotionally adjust to the end of his marriage, or the fact that Jones had left him and married the single most powerful and wealthy person in Hollywood. On a note of sad irony, the two appeared opposite one another as lovers in a blockbuster produced by Selznick, the 1944 Since You Went Away. Tragically, Walker struggled for years to cope with the divorce, and his life ended at the age of 32, when, following a nervous breakdown and an institutionalization, he received a fatal dose of sodium amatol from a psychiatrist.
Jones did the bulk of her early work under new husband Selznick's aegis, and for 15-20 years her career thrived. Selznick preferred casting her in romantic material (often with a tragic undercurrent), and his instincts struck a chord with the public. After receiving an Oscar for her turn as the scorned and martyred Catholic saint Bernadette in the 1943 religious drama The Song of Bernadette, she starred opposite Joseph Cotten in the 1948 fantasy romance Portrait of Jennie (also a huge hit), played Emma Bovary in Vincente Minnelli's 1949 Madame Bovary, and the tragic title character in William Wyler's Theodore Dreiser adaptation Carrie (1952). Yet Jones also unveiled a wicked flair for comedy on a number of occasions, notably as an English cockney plumber in Ernst Lubitsch's magnificent 1946 farce Cluny Brown, and as an English lord's wife plagued by pathological lying in the unfairly maligned John Huston comedy Beat the Devil (1953).
Jones continued her acting work into the late '60s, and she racked up a series of four additional Oscar nods for various performances, yet her screen appearances grew less and less frequent. Her private life and marriage to Selznick reportedly brought its share of complications, and the couple's first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage; following Selznick's death in June 1965, Jones endured a lengthy period of severe depression. The actress remarried philanthropist Norton Simon in the early '70s, and co-ran a foundation that he chaired, with the assistance of various celebrity friends. The second marriage lasted until Simon's death in the summer of 1993. Jones accepted one of her final screen roles in the 1974 disaster opus The Towering Inferno, a part for which she drew a substantial amount of acclaim. ~ All Movie Guide
Jones was born Phylis Lee Isley in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the daughter of Flora Mae (née Suber) and Phillip Ross Isley.[1] Her parents toured the Midwest in a traveling tent show they owned and operated. Jones attended Monte Cassino Junior College in Tulsa and Northwestern University, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority before transferring to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City in 1938. It was here she met and fell in love with fellow acting student Robert Walker. The two were married on January 2, 1939.
They returned to Tulsa for a 13-week radio program arranged by her father, and then headed for Hollywood. Isley landed two small roles, first in a 1939 John Wayne western titled New Frontier, followed by a serial entitled, Dick Tracy's G-Men. In these two films, she was billed as "Phyllis Isley" (Phyllis now spelled with two Ls). However, when she and Walker failed a screen test for Paramount Pictures, they decided to return to New York City.
Career
While Walker found steady work in radio programs, Isley worked part-time modeling hats for the Powers Agency while looking for possible acting jobs. When she learned of auditions for the lead role of Claudia in Rose Franken’s hit play of the same name, she presented herself to David O. Selznick’s New York office but fled in tears after what she thought was a bad reading. Selznick, however, 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 and she won the coveted role over hundreds of applicants. In 1944, on her 25th birthday, Jones won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as St. Bernadette. That year, Jones' friend, Ingrid Bergman, was also a Best Actress nominee for her work in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Jones apologized to Bergman, who replied, "No, Jennifer, your Bernadette was better than my Maria." Jones presented the Best Actress Oscar the following year to Bergman for Gaslight.[2]
The portrait of Jones for the film Portrait of Jennie was painted by Robert Brackman.
Her last big-screen appearance came in the spectacular disaster film The Towering Inferno (1974), in which she danced with Fred Astaire before a fire threatened partygoers in a new San Francisco skyscraper.
Jones was a five-time Oscar nominee.
Personal life
Jones' first marriage produced two sons, Robert Walker Jr. (born April 15, 1940), and Michael Walker (born March 13, 1941). Both later became actors. Jones had a love affair with David O. Selznick, which eventually led to her separation from Walker in November 1943 and divorce in June 1945.
Jones wed Selznick on July 13, 1949, a marriage that lasted until his death on June 22, 1965. After his death, she semi-retired from acting; her last appearance was in 1974's The Towering Inferno. According to media reports, Jones attempted suicide in May 1967; she was hospitalized in a coma before eventually recovering. Later her only child with Selznick, Mary Jennifer Selznick (1954-1976), committed suicide by jumping from a 20th-floor window. This led to Jones' interest in mental health issues.
On May 29, 1971, Jones married multi-millionaire industrialist, art collector and philanthropist Norton Simon, whose son Robert had committed suicide in 1969. Years before, Simon had attempted to buy the portrait of her used in the film Portrait of Jennie. Simon later met Jones at a party hosted by fellow industrialist/art collector Walter Annenberg. Norton Simon died in June 1993. Jennifer Jones-Simon is Trustee Emeritus of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.
Jones is a breast cancer survivor. The actress Susan Strasberg, who died of breast cancer, was married to actor Christopher Jones and named her only child Jennifer Robin Jones in the actress's honor.
At age 90, Jennifer Jones enjoys a quiet retirement in Southern California close to her son. She grants no interviews and rarely appears in public.
Mary Jennifer Selznick (August 12, 1954 – May 11, 1976). She had developed deep emotional problems and had never fully gotten over her father's death. She was living in a dark fantasy world and, according to one source, experimented with drugs and had had a nervous breakdown. While Jennifer was on a visit to Tulsa to visit her dying father, Mary Jennifer jumped to her death from a 22-story building in Los Angeles.
