Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun
Jennifer Jones, the Oscar-winning star of the 1943 blockbuster The Song of Bernadette and the wife of Gone with the Wind producer David O. Selznick, died of "natural causes" earlier today at her home in Malibu. Jones was 90.
In addition to her Bernadette Soubirous in Henry King's film about the young French peasant who claimed to see and talk to the Virgin Mary, Jones also received Oscar nominations for playing Claudette Colbert's all-American daughter in John Cromwell's Since You Went Away (1944, in the supporting actress category), an amnesiac who may have murdered her husband in William Dieterle's psychological noir Love Letters (1945), a wilful "half-breed" in King Vidor's scorching Duel in the Sun, and an Eurasian doctor in love with correspondent William Holden in Henry King's 1955 hit Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.
Though not one of the more revered actresses from Hollywood's studio era, Jennifer Jones was actually a better performer than most. If her fire-spitting Pearl Chavez in Duel in the Sun is pure camp, she was flawless in Dieterle's supernatural romantic drama Portrait of Jennie (1948), in which she plays a lovestruck ghost, and is perfectly believable as invalid Elizabeth Barrett in Sidney Franklin's English-made The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1957).
"It's hard to believe that her measured steps, practiced speech and other Oriental characteristics are not her real personality," wrote Film Daily about her performance in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, while James Agee called her star-making turn in The Song of Bernadette "one of the most impressive screen debuts [sic] in years." (Jones had already appeared in a serial and a B Western opposite John Wayne before her "official" debut. She was then known as Phyllis Isley.)
Among Jones' other film appearances are those in Ernst Lubitsch's Cluny Brown (1946), opposite Charles Boyer (above); John Huston's political thriller We Were Strangers (1949), with John Garfield; Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary (1949), with Louis Jourdan and Van Heflin; William Wyler's Carrie (1952), in which she proves herself more than a match to Laurence Olivier; and King Vidor's Ruby Gentry (1952), with Charlton Heston.
Also, Vittorio De Sica's Indiscretion of an American Wife (1954), opposite Montgomery Clift; John Huston's Beat the Devil (1954), with Humphrey Bogart; Nunnally Johnson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), with Gregory Peck; Charles Vidor's A Farewell to Arms (1957), with Rock Hudson; Henry King's Tender Is the Night (1962), with Jason Robards; and John Guillermin's The Towering Inferno (1974), as the woman who falls off the elevator.
Before marrying Selznick, the man who turned her into a star, Jones was the wife of actor Robert Walker, best known for playing the gay psycho in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Walker became an alcoholic and died in 1951, at the age of 32. Selznick died in 1965. Jones later married multimillionaire Norton Simon, who died in 1993.
She'd been in ill health lately. According to a friend, her memory was all but gone.
In March, on the occasion of her 90th birthday, I wrote a lengthy piece about Jennifer Jones and her career.
As a kid I watched "Good Morning Miss Dove" a thousand times. The ending with Robert Stack carrying her out on that chair, is to me her spirit in her films, beautiful, firey, stoic, kind, exotic, demure, extraordinary. I love every single one of her movies. It is difficult to choose which I like the best, and I am ever drawn in immediately watching her acting full of strength and passion. She is my Hollywood Star Hero, and it is a very sad day indeed.
She was such a wonderful actress. I will never forget her in 'The Song of Bernadette' and 'Love Is a Many Splendored Thing'.