Jennifer Jones

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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.

She was nominated for the Oscar five times throughout her career, including one for Best Actress and two for Best Actress in a Drama.

Jones is one of the youngest actresses to be honoured by the Academy Awards, having won on her 25th birthday. Jones, a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, served as a model in her youth before converting to acting, appearing in two serial films in 1939.

Bernadette Soubirous' third role in The Song of Bernadette (1943), earning her the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Actress that year.

She went on to appear in numerous films that earned her significant critical acclaim and a further three Academy Award nominations in the early-1940s, including Since You Went Away (1944), Love Letters (1945), and Duel in the Sun (1946). Jones married film director David O. Selznick and appeared as the titular Madame Bovary in Vincente Minnelli's 1949 film.

Ruby Gentry (1952), John Huston's adventure comedy Beat the Devil (1953), and Vittorio De Sica's drama Terminal Station (also 1953).

Jones received her fifth Academy Award for her role as a Eurasian doctor in Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955). Jones married industrialist Norton Simon in 1965 and moved to semi-retirement.

In The Towering Inferno (1974), she made her final film appearance (1974).

Jones suffered with mental illness throughout her life and survived a 1966 suicide attempt in which she leapt from a cliff in Malibu Beach.

Jones became particularly interested in mental health education after her own daughter died in 1976.

Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation for Mental Health and Education was founded in 1980.

She lived in Malibu, California, where she died in 2009 at the age of 90. She spent the remainder of her life disconnected from the public.

1919–1939: Early life

Jones was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the niece of Flora Mae (née Suber) and Phillip Ross Isley. Her father was a native of Georgia, while her mother was a native of Sacramento, California. She was raised Roman Catholic as an infant. Both her parents, who are new to stage, toured the Midwest in a touring tent show that they owned and operated. Jones accompanied them on several occasions as part of the Isley Stock Company, and they were accompanied by them.

Jones attended Edgemere Public School in Oklahoma City in 1925 and then transferred to Monte Cassino, a Catholic girls school and junior college in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She enrolled as a drama major at Northwestern University in Illinois, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority before moving to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City in September, 1937. She met and fell in love with fellow acting student Robert Walker, a native of Ogden, Utah, during their stay there. They were married on January 2, 1939, 1939.

Jones and Walker stayed in Tulsa for a 13-week radio show produced by her father's company and then moved to Hollywood. She appeared in two small roles, first in the 1939 John Wayne Western New Frontier, which she directed in the summer of 1939 for Republic Pictures. Dick Tracy's G-Men (1939), also for Republic, was her second project. In both films, she was credited as Phylis Isley. After failing a screen test for Paramount Pictures, she became dissatisfied with Hollywood and moved to New York City.

Shortly after Jones married Walker, she gave birth to two children: Robert Walker Jr. (1940–2009) and Michael Walker (1941–2007). Though Walker found steady work in radio shows, Jones also worked part-time modeling for the Powers Agency and posed for Harper's Bazaar when searching for acting jobs. As she learned of auditions for Rose Franken's lead role in the summer of 1941, she introduced herself to David O. Selznick's New York office but then collapsed in tears over what she felt was a bad reading. Selznick had overhearded her appearance and was bemoan enough to get his secretary to call her back. She was given a seven-year deal following an interview.

Jennifer Jones, a girl who had been preparing for fame, was carefully groomed for success and given a new name: Jennifer Jones. Director Henry King was inspired by her screen audition for Bernadette Soubirous (1943), which culminates in her becoming one of hundreds of applicants. She received the Academy Award for Best Actress for her appearance as Bernadette, her third film role, in 1944, on her 25th birthday.

Jones began an affair with producer Selznick as a result of her rise to fame for The Song of Bernadette. She began working with Walker in November 1943, co-starred with him in Since You Went Away (1944), and officially divorced him in June 1945. She was nominated for her second Academy Award this year, this time for Best Supporting Actress. She was nominated for her role in Joseph Cotten's film noir Love Letters (1945), earning her her third Academy Award nomination.

Jones' sombre beauty and first saintly appearance (from her first appearance in Selznick's Selznick's tense Western Duel (1946), where she portrayed a Mestiza orphanage in Texas who falls in love with an Anglo man and a migrant man. (played by Gregory Peck) She appeared as the title character in Ernst Lubitsch's romantic comedy Cluny Brown as a working-class English woman who falls in love right before World War II. Portrait of Jennie, a fantasy film released in 1948, was based on Robert Nathan's novella. It brought her co-star Cotten, who played a painter who became obsessed with her character, the titular Jennie, back to her co-star. It was a commercial setback, grossing only $1.5 million out of a $4 million budget.

After enduring a five-year relationship, Jones married Selznick at sea on July 13, 1949, en route to Europe. She appeared in numerous films he created over the past two decades and started a professional relationship. Jones starred in John Huston's adventure film We Were Strangers in the year they were born. Jones' appearance was lacking, according to Bosley Crowther of The New York Times: "There is no knowledge nor enthusiasm in the robust, frigid creature she creates." She was then cast as Madame Bovary (1949), a role originally planned for Lana Turner, but Turner later dropped. Variety called the film "interesting to watch but difficult to comprehend," but it was also said that "Jones answers to every request for direction and script." Jones appeared in the Powell and Pressburger-directed fantasy Gone to Earth in 1950 as a superstitious gypsy woman in the English countryside.

In William Wyler's drama Carrie (1952), opposite Laurence Olivier, Jones appeared for the first time. "Mr. Olivier gives the film its closest contact with the book," Crowther of The New York Times writes, while Miss Jones' soft, nephic portrait of Carrie takes it farthest away." She co-starred with Charlton Heston in Ruby Gentry in 1952, playing a femme fatale in rural North Carolina who becomes embroiled in a murder mystery after marrying a local man. Joan Fontaine had been considered "unfit to play backwoods" before she was given the opportunity. Variety characterized the film as a "sordid story [with] neither Jennifer Jones nor Charlton Heston gaining any sympathy in their characters."

Jones appeared opposite Montgomery Clift in the Italian director Vittorio De Sica's Terminal Station (Italian: Stazione Termini), a Rome-set drama about an American woman and an Italian man in 1953. Selznick's film had a difficult run in production history, with Selznick and De Sica arguing over the film's screenplay and tone. Clift sided with De Sica, and Selznick was reportedly branded "an interfering fuck-face" on set. Jones was mourning the recent death of her first husband, Robert Walker, along with her two sons who were staying in Switzerland during production. Terminal Station was shown at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival and later became available in the United States in a heavily truncated version, bearing the inscription Indiscretion of an American Wife. Jones co-starred in his film Beat the Devil (1953), an adventure comedy co-starring Humphrey Bogart. The film was a box-office flop and was critically panned upon its release, causing even Bogart to distance himself from it. However, it would revalue in later years from such writers as Roger Ebert, who included it in his list of "Great Movies" and cited it as the first "camp" film. In August 1954, Jones gave birth to her third child, daughter Mary Jennifer Selznick.

Jones was later portrayed as Han Suyin in the film Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), which was her fifth Academy Award nomination. Crowther of The New York Times praised her appearance as "lovefully and ardent." Her dark skin echoes both sun and sadness. She appeared as a schoolteacher in Good Morning, Miss Dove (1955), opposite Robert Stack, and in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a drama about a World War II soldier.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning starred in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, based on Rudolf Besier's 1930 play. She escorted this with a lead in Ernest Hemingway's adaptation A Farewell to Arms (1957), which was opposite Rock Hudson. "The friendship between Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones never takes on realistic perspective," Variety said. Jones' new venture, another literary adaptation (this time F. Scott Fitzgerald), arrived five years after Tender Is the Night, in which she portrayed the physically fragile Nicole Diver, who was caught her husband's falling in love with another woman while in the south of France.

Jones, a registered Republican who endorsed Dwight Eisenhower's campaign in the 1952 presidential election and was a member of the Catholic Church of Dwight Eisenhower.

Selznick died at the age of 63 on June 22, 1965, and Jones semi-retired from acting after his death. Her first appearance in four years was as the mother of an adult son in the Swing Sixties London, who has an affair with his best friend.

Jones appeared in Clifford Odets' The Country Girl revival, co-starring Rip Torn, at New York's City Center in 1966. Jones attempted suicide on November 9, 1967, the same day her close friend, Charles Bickford, died of a blood disease, Jones attempted suicide by scaling from the cliff overlooking Malibu Beach. It was news of Bickford's death that caused Jones' suicide attempt, according to biographer Paul Green. She was hospitalized in a coma from the crash before recovering. In 1969, Angel, Angel, Down We Go, a teenage girl who manipulates her family using her connections with a rock band.

Jones married Norton Simon, a multi-millionaire industrialist, art collector, and philanthropist from Portland, Oregon, on May 29, 1971. Eirion Phillips, a Unitarian minister, conducted the wedding aboard a tug boat five miles off the coast of England, and it was carried out by Unitarian minister Eirion Phillips. Simon had attempted to buy the portrait of her that was used in the film Portrait of Jennie years before; Simon later visited Jones at a party hosted by fellow industrialist and art collector Walter Annenberg. In the smash-hit disaster film The Towering Inferno (1974), which worried about the torching of a San Francisco skyscraper, she made her last big-screen appearance. She was given the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work as a doomed guest in the building. Paintings were lent to the film's production by Jones' husband Simon's art gallery, and early scenes of the film showed paintings lent to the gallery's installation.

Mary, Jones' 21-year-old daughter, who was a student at Occidental College, died by suicide after falling from the roof of a 22-story apartment hotel in downtown Los Angeles two years ago. Jones' subsequent interest in mental health issues led to his interest in mental health. Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation For Mental Health And Education, a non-profit that operated until 1999, she and her partner Simon (whose own son, Robert, died by suicide in 1969). One of Jones' main objectives with the Foundation was to destigmatize mental disorders. "I crepte when I confess to being suicidal and had mental issues, but why should I?" Jones said in 1980 that he had lived in 1980. "I hope we can reeducate the world so that there is no longer a need for stigma in mental disorders than there is for cancer." At the time, she also revealed that she had been a psychotherapist patient since age 24.

Jones spent the remainder of her life outside of the public eye. She resigned as President of Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, four years before her husband Simon's death in June 1993, and Jennifer Jones Simon was named chairman of the Board of Trustees, President and Executive Officer. Nancy Goslee Power, an architect, and landscape designer Frank Gehry began collaborating on restoring the museum and gardens in 1996. She served as the curator of the Norton Simon Museum from 2003 to 2003, when she was granted emerita status.

1965–2009: Later life and activities

Selznick died on June 22, 1965, and Jones semi-retired from acting following his death. Her first role in four years was as the mother of an adult son in the Swing Sixties London, who is also a mentor.

Jones appeared in Clifford Odets' The Country Girl, co-starring Rip Torn, at the City Center in 1966. Jones attempted suicide on November 9, 1967, the same day her close friend Charles Bickford died of a blood clotus, Jones attempted suicide by scaling a cliff overlooking Malibu Beach. It was news of Bickford's death that triggered Jones' suicide attempt, according to biographer Paul Green. Until later recovering, she was hospitalized in a coma from the crash. Down We Go, a teenager girl who uses her rock band to manipulate her family.

Jones married Norton Simon, a multi-millionaire industrialist, art collector, and philanthropist from Portland, Oregon, on May 29, 1971. The wedding was held onboard a tugboat five miles off the coast of England, and Unitarian Minister Eirion Phillips conducted it. Simon attempted to buy the portrait of her that was used in the film Portrait of Jennie years before; Simon later joined Jones at a party hosted by fellow industrialist and art collector Walter Annenberg. In the smash-hit disaster film The Towering Inferno (1974), which worried about the raging of a San Francisco skyscraper, she made her last big-screen appearance. She received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work as a doomed guest in the building. Paintings were lent to the film's husband Simon's art gallery's contribution in the early scenes.

Mary, Jones' 21-year-old daughter, who was a student at Occidental College, died by suicide after falling from the roof of a 22-story apartment hotel in downtown Los Angeles two years ago. Jones' interest in mental health issues developed as a result of his previous interest in mental health. She founded the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation for Mental Health and Education in 1979, with husband Simon (who had lost his own son, Robert), who died by suicide in 1969. One of Jones' main objectives with the Foundation was to de-stigmatize mental illness. "I crept back when I admit to being suicidal and had mental disorders, but why should I?" In 1980, Jones said. "I hope we can reeducate the world to see that there is no longer a need for stigma in mental disorders than there is for cancer." At the time, she also revealed that she had been a patient of psychotherapy since age 24.

Jones spent the remainder of her life outside of the public eye. Shen Simon Simon resigned as president of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena four years before her husband Simon's death in June 1993, and Jennifer Jones Simon was named chairman of the Board of Trustees. She began collaborating with architect Frank Gehry and landscape designer Nancy Goslee Power on renovating the museum and gardens in 1996. She was active as the director of the Norton Simon Museum until 2003, when she was granted emerita status.

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1940–1948: Career beginnings

Robert Walker Jr. (1940–2019), and Michael Walker (1941–2007), a short time after Jones married Walker. Though Walker continued to work in radio sales, Jones also worked part-time modelling for the Powers Agency and posed for Harper's Bazaar when searching for acting jobs. She notified auditions for the lead role in Rose Franken's hit play Claudia in the summer of 1941 but then collapsed in tears after what she considered a poor reading. Selznick, on the other hand, had overhearded her audition and was intrigued enough to demand his secretary call her back. Following an interview, she was committed to a seven-year deal.

Jennifer Jones, she had been specifically preparing for fame and given a new name: Jennifer Jones. Director Henry King was captivated by her screen test as Bernadette Soubirous (1943), which was a highly coveted role among hundreds of applicants. Bernadette, her third screen appearance, was nominated for Best Actress on her 25th birthday in 1944.

Jones, who is on the rise to fame for The Song of Bernadette, began a relationship with producer Selznick. She broke with Walker in November 1943, co-starred with him in Since You Went Away (1944), and officially divorced him in June 1945. She was nominated for her second Academy Award, this time for Best Supporting Actress. In the film noir Love Letters (1945), she received her third Academy Award nomination for her role opposite Joseph Cotten.

Jones' dark appearance and first saintly appearance (from her first film appearance) was a stark contrast three years later when she was portrayed as a vivacious biracial woman in Selznick's controversial Western Duel in the Sun (1946), where she played a Mestiza orphanage in Texas who falls in love with an Anglo man. (played by Gregory Peck). She appeared in Ernst Lubitsch's romantic comedy Cluny Brown as a working-class English woman who falls in love right before World War II. Portrait of Jennie, a fantasy film released in 1948, was based on Robert Nathan's novella. It brought her co-star Cotten, who portrayed a painter who became obsessed with her character, the titular Jennie, back to her family unit. It was a commercial fail, earning only $1.5 million against a $4 million budget.

After going on a five-year relationship, Jones married Selznick at sea on July 13, 1949, en route to Europe. She appeared in many films over the next two decades, and she and his partner developed a working relationship. Jones appeared in John Huston's adventure film We Were Strangers for the year they married. The New York Times' Bosley Crowther wrote that Jones' appearance was lacking, saying: "There is no insight nor enthusiasm in the stifled creature she creates." She was later cast as the title character of Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary (1949), a role that had been planned for Lana Turner but which Turner dropped. Variety called the film "interesting to watch, but impossible to feel," though it was announced that "Jones answers to every request for direction and script." Jones appeared in Powell and Pressburger's fantasy Gone to Earth in 1950 as a stitiful gypsy woman in the English countryside.

Jones appeared in William Wyler's tragedy Carrie (1952), opposite Laurence Olivier. "Mr. Olivier gives the film its closest contact with the film," Crowther of The New York Times writes: "Mr. Olivier gives the film its closest contact with the film, while Miss Jones' soft, seraphic portrait of Carrie takes it furthest away." She co-starred with Charlton Heston in Ruby Gentry in 1952, portraying a femme fatale in rural North Carolina who is embroiled in a murder plot after marrying a local man. Joan Fontaine was previously considered "unable to play backwoods" and was "unsuited to play backwoods." Variety characterized the film as a "sordid tragedy [with] neither Jennifer Jones nor Charlton Heston gaining any sympathy in their characters."

Jones was portrayed opposite Montgomery Clift in Italian director Vittorio De Sica's Terminal Station (Italian: Stazione Termini), a Rome-set drama about an American woman and an Italian man in 1953. Selznick's film had a turbulent run in production history, with Selznick and De Sica arguing over the film's screenplay and tone. Clift sided with De Sica and Selznick was reportedly branded "an interfering fuck-face" on set. Jones herself was mourning the recent death of her first husband, Robert Walker, and also the fact that her two sons were staying in Switzerland during production. Terminal Station was shown at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival and then relaunched in the United States in a truncated form, bearing the word Indiscretion of an American Wife. Jones co-starred Humphrey Bogart in his film Beat the Devil (1953), an adventure comedy co-starring John Huston. Following its debut, the film was a box-office disaster and was critically panned on release, causing even Bogart to withdraw from it. However, it would devalue in later years from writers such as Roger Ebert, who included it in his list of "Great Movies" and cited it as the first "camp" film in later years. Mary Jennifer Selznick, Jones' third child, was born in August 1954.

Jones was later featured as Eurasian doctor Han Suyin in the film Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), which earned her her her fifth Academy Award nomination. "Lovely and ardent," Crowther of The New York Times praised her performance. Her smoky beauty reflects both hope and sadness. She appeared as a schoolteacher in Good Morning, Miss Dove (1955), opposite Robert Stack, followed by a lead role opposite Gregory Peck in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a drama about a World War II soldier.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning appeared as Elizabeth Barrett Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a 1930 play by Rudolf Besier. She continued this with a lead in Ernest Hemingway's adaptation A Farewell to Arms (1957), which was opposite Rock Hudson. Variety said that "the friendship between Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones never takes on realistic terms." Jones' next project, another literary adaptation (this time of F. Scott Fitzgerald), came five years later in 1962's Tender Is the Night, in which she portrayed Nicole Diver's empathetic husband's falling in love with another woman while in the south of France.

Jones, a registered Republican who endorsed Dwight Eisenhower's campaign in the 1952 presidential election and was of the Catholic faith, was a registered Republican who was in favor of the Catholic Church.

Selznick died on June 22, 1965, and Jones semi-retired from acting after his death. Her first appearance in four years was as the mother of an adult son in the Swing Sixties London who has an affair with his best friend.

Jones appeared in Clifford Odets' The Country Girl revival in 1966, co-starring Rip Torn, at New York's City Center. Jones attempted suicide on November 9, 1967, the same day her close friend, Charles Bickford died of a blood disease, but he jumped from the cliff overlooking Malibu Beach. It was news of Bickford's death that triggered Jones' suicide attempt, according to biographer Paul Green. She was hospitalized in a coma from the accident before recovering. She appeared on Down We Go in 1969 about a teenage girl who manipulates her family using her friendship with a rock band.

Jones married Norton Simon, a multi-millionaire industrialist, art collector, and philanthropist from Portland, Oregon, on May 29, 1971. The wedding was held aboard a tugboat five miles off the coast of England, and was conducted by Unitarian Minister Eirion Phillips. Simon had attempted to purchase a portrait of her that was used in the film Portrait of Jennie years before; Simon later met Jones at a party hosted by fellow industrialist and art collector Walter Annenberg. Her last big-screen appearance came in the smash-hit disaster film The Towering Inferno (1974), which was concerned with the burning of a San Francisco skyscraper. A Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress was given to her for her role as a doomed visitor in the building. Paintings were lent to the work by Jones' husband Simon's art gallery in the beginning of the film.

Mary Jones' 21-year-old daughter, Mary—then a student at Occidental College — died by suicide after falling from the roof of a 22-story apartment hotel in downtown Los Angeles two years ago. Jones later expressed an interest in mental health problems as a result. She founded the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation for Mental Health and Education in 1979, marrying Robert, Robert's own son, who died by suicide in 1969). One of Jones' main objectives with the Foundation was to reduce mental illness. "I crept when I confess I've been suicidal and had mental disorders, but why would I?" In 1980, Jones said that he had lived in the United States. "I hope we can reeducate the world to see there is no more need for stigma in mental disorders than there is for cancer." She also admitted that she had been a patient of psychotherapy since age 24.

Jones spent the remainder of her life outside of the public eye. She resigned as President of Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, four years before her husband Simon's death in June 1993, and Jennifer Jones Simon was named Chairman of the Board of Trustees, President and Executive Officer. She began working with architect Frank Gehry and landscape designer Nancy Goslee Power on renovating the museum and gardens in 1996. She served as the director of the Norton Simon Museum until 2003, when she was granted emerita status.

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