Jennifer Jones

Jennifer Jones, born Phylis Lee Isley on March 2, 1919, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was an American actress and mental health advocate whose career extended across more than five decades. She died on December 17, 2009, in Malibu, California, at the age of 90. During her lifetime she received five Academy Award nominations, winning Best Actress, and earned a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama.

Jones was the only child of Flora Mae and Phillip Ross Isley, both aspiring stage actors who ran a traveling tent show across the Midwest. She performed occasionally with their company, the Isley Stock Company, as a child. Her early education included Edgemere Public School in Oklahoma City and Monte Cassino, a Catholic girls school and junior college in Tulsa. She later enrolled as a drama major at Northwestern University in Illinois, where she joined Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, before transferring to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City in September 1937. There she met fellow student Robert Walker, whom she married on January 2, 1939. The couple had two sons: Robert Walker Jr., born in 1940, and Michael Walker, born in 1941.

After returning to Tulsa for a radio program arranged by her father, Jones and Walker relocated to Hollywood, where she appeared in two small productions for Republic Pictures under her birth name, Phylis Isley: the 1939 John Wayne Western New Frontier and the serial Dick Tracy's G-Men. Following an unsuccessful screen test for Paramount Pictures, she returned to New York. In 1941, she auditioned for the lead role in Rose Franken's play Claudia, which brought her to the attention of producer David O. Selznick. He signed her to a seven-year contract and gave her the screen name Jennifer Jones. Director Henry King cast her as Bernadette Soubirous in The Song of Bernadette (1943) after she won the role over hundreds of applicants. On her 25th birthday in 1944, she received the Academy Award for Best Actress for that performance, which was only her third screen role.

The success of The Song of Bernadette launched a period of sustained critical recognition. Jones co-starred with Robert Walker in Since You Went Away (1944), earning her second Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Supporting Actress. A third consecutive nomination followed for her work opposite Joseph Cotten in Love Letters (1945). She then took on a markedly different role in Selznick's Duel in the Sun (1946), playing a mixed-race indigenous orphan in Texas, a performance that earned her a fourth Academy Award nomination. That same year she appeared in Ernst Lubitsch's romantic comedy Cluny Brown and reunited with Cotten in the fantasy film Portrait of Jennie (1948), based on Robert Nathan's novella of the same name, though the film was a commercial disappointment, earning approximately $1.5 million against a $4 million budget.

Jones married Selznick on July 13, 1949, at sea while traveling to Europe. That year she starred opposite John Garfield in John Huston's We Were Strangers and took the title role in Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary, a part originally intended for Lana Turner. Her film work in the early 1950s included the Powell and Pressburger fantasy Gone to Earth (1950), William Wyler's drama Carrie (1952) with Laurence Olivier, and Ruby Gentry (1952) alongside Charlton Heston, in which she played a femme fatale in rural North Carolina. In 1953 she appeared in Italian director Vittorio De Sica's Terminal Station, filmed in Rome opposite Montgomery Clift, and in John Huston's adventure comedy Beat the Devil. Her fifth Academy Award nomination came for Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), in which she portrayed a Eurasian doctor.

Jones made her Broadway appearance in 1954, with her stage credit including Portrait of a Lady. Following Selznick's death in 1965, she married industrialist Norton Simon and largely stepped back from performing. Her final film role came in The Towering Inferno (1974), for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture.

The death of her daughter, Mary Jennifer Selznick, by suicide in 1976 at the age of 22, prompted Jones to dedicate significant energy to mental health education. In 1980 she established the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation for Mental Health and Education. She spent the final six years of her life in Malibu, California, where she died of natural causes in 2009.