Jennifer Jones

Phyllis Lee Isley (Tulsa, Oklahoma, March 2, 1919-Malibu, California, December 17, 2009), known as Jennifer Jones, was a American actress. During her career that spanned more than five decades, she was nominated for an Academy Award five times and won in the Best Actress category for The Song of Bernadette in 1944, being one of the youngest to achieve this award at only 25 years old. She is also known for her roles in films from the 1940s and 1950s such as Duel in the Sun, The Sin of Cluny Brown, The Devil's Mockery i> or Madame Bovary.

Biography

1919–1939: Early years

Phyllis Lee Isley was born in Tulsa (Oklahoma), daughter of Flora Mae (née Suber) and Phillip Ross Isley. Her parents, who raised her Catholic, already belonged to the world of entertainment as they were both theater actors and together with them he toured much of the American Midwest. Jones accompanied them as part of his own company, the Isley Stock Company. In 1925, Jones attended Edgemere Public School in Oklahoma City, and later Monte Cassino Institute in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a Catholic girls' school. After graduating, he enrolled in acting at Northwestern University in Illinois, where he was a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority before going to the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts in September 1937. There he met another student, the actor Robert Walker, whom she married on January 2, 1939.

The couple moved to Hollywood, where Jones appeared in two small roles: in a John Wayne western and in the television series Dick Tracy's G-Men. i>. However, neither she nor her husband passed a screen test for Paramount, so they returned to New York.

Jones and Walker returned to Tulsa to participate in a radio show with their father and later moved to Hollywood. He appeared in two small roles in the western New Frontier with John Wayne, which was filmed in the summer of 1939 for Republic Pictures, and in Dick Tracy's G-Men. /i> (1939), also for Republic. In both works, she was credited under the name Phylis Isley. After two failed screen tests for Paramount Pictures, she left Hollywood disenchanted to return to New York.

1940–1948: Rapid stardom in Hollywood

Shortly after marrying Walker, she had two sons: Robert Walker Jr. (1940–2019) and Michael Walker (1941–2007). While Walker was searching for radio shows, Jones was working as a hat model for the Powers Agency or at Harper's Bazaar. When she auditioned for the role of Rose Franken in the film Claudia in the summer of 1941 before producer David O. Selznick, Jones could not finish as she burst into tears. However, Selznick was impressed and ended up signing the actress to a contract. After a second interview, she signed a seven-year contract.

They carefully groomed her for stardom and gave her a new stage name: Jennifer Jones. Director Henry King was impressed by the actress and gave her the role of Bernadette Soubirous in the film The Song of Bernadette, ahead of hundreds of candidates.. This performance (the third of her career) earned her the Oscar for best actress in 1943.

As her name rose to stardom thanks to The Song of Bernadette, Jones began a romance with Selznick. She separated from Robert Walker in November 1943 due to the actor's emotional instability (although she co-starred with him in Since You Went Away in 1944) and they formally divorced in June 1945. For her performance in Since You Went Away, she was nominated for her second Oscar, this time in the category of best supporting actress. Her third nomination would come for her appearance in the film noir Letters to my beloved (Love Letters) with Joseph Cotten (1945).

The aggressive beauty contrasted with Jones' virginal image (partly derived from her role as Bernadette) served as an explosive cocktail when she starred as the provocative mixed-race woman in Selznick's production Duel in the Sun) (1946), who falls in love with the role played by Gregory Peck. That same year, she would star in the romantic comedy The Sin of Cluny Brown by Ernst Lubitsch, where she would play a woman of working class who falls in love just before the start of World War II. In 1947, he filmed Jennie (Portrait of Jennie) based on the novel of the same name by Robert Nathan. In it he again met Cotten, who plays a painter who becomes obsessed with his muse, Jennie. This film was a commercial failure, grossing $1.5 million compared to the $4 it cost to produce.

1949–1965: Marriage to Selznick

Jones married Selznick on the high seas en route to Europe on July 13, 1949, after a five-year relationship. Over two decades, she appeared in numerous films that Selznick produced. Jones' roles were carefully selected by him, establishing a romantic relationship with strong working relationships. The public discussion of her working relationship with her husband, David O. Selznick, often overshadowed her career. Biographer Paul Green maintains that while Selznick helped facilitate her career and sought roles for her, "Jones stood out because she not only possessed exceptional beauty but also had genuine talent."

A year after her marriage, Jones starred alongside John Garfield in John Huston's play We Were Strangers. Critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that he was absent from Jones' performance, noting: "There is no understanding or passion in the rigid, frigid creature he achieves." His next role was the lead in the version of < i>Madame Bovary by Vincente Minnelli (1949), a role that was initially wanted to be given to Lana Turner, but the actress declined. Variety considered the film to be "interesting to look at, but difficult to feel,' although it was noted that 'Jones responds to all the demands of direction and the script.' In 1950, Jones starred in Powell and Pressburger's fantasy film < i>Wild at Heart (Gone to Earth) in the role of a superstitious young gypsy woman.

Jones' next role was the William Wyler drama Carrie (1952), opposite Laurence Olivier. Crowther of The New York Times was not very enthusiastic about her performance and wrote: "Mr. Olivier gives the film its closest contact with the book, while Carrie's soft, seraphic portrayal of Miss Jones distances it." Also in 1952, co-starred with Charlton Heston in the film Ruby Gentry, playing the role of a femme fatale in a North Carolina town who becomes involved in a crime after marrying another man from the town. This role was previously offered to Joan Fontaine, who rejected it. Variety's critics considered the film a 'sordid drama in which neither Jennifer Jones nor Charlton Heston had won the sympathy in their characters.

In 1953, Jones accompanied Montgomery Clift in director Vittorio De Sica's project Termini Station (Stazione Termini), a romantic drama set in Rome between two Americans. The film, produced by Selznick, had a troubled production history, with Selznick and De Sica arguing over the script and tone of the film. Clift sided with De Sica and reportedly called Selznick "a shitface nosy" on set. In addition to tensions between cast and crew, Jones herself was mourning the recent death of her first husband, Robert Walker, and was also missing her two children, who stayed in Switzerland during production.. Termini Station was presented at the Cannes Film Festival, and just afterwards released in a very clumsy way in the United States, with the title "Indiscretion of an American Wife" Also in 1953, Jones again worked with director John Huston to star in Beat the Devil (1953), an adventure comedy with Humphrey Bogart. The film was a failure. at the box office and was strongly criticized after its release, which even led Bogart to distance himself from it. In any case, it was re-released a few years later and some critics such as Roger Ebert include it as one of the great films in the history of cinema. In August 1954, Jones gave birth to her third child, Mary Jennifer Selznick.

Her next role was that of Eurasian doctor Han Suyin in the drama Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), a role for which she earned her fifth nomination. to the Oscars. Critic Phillip Crowther of The New York Times praised her performance as "charming and intense. Her dark beauty reflects the sun and sadness." Immediately after, she starred in The Terrible Miss Dove (Good Morning, Miss Dove) (1955) alongside Robert Stack, and accompanied Gregory Peck in the lead roles in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a drama about a World War II veteran.

In 1957, she played the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the historical drama The Barretts of Wimpole Street, based on the play of the same name by Rudolf Besier. She was followed by the female role in Ernest Hemingway's classic A Farewell to Arms (1957), alongside Rock Hudson. The film received mixed reviews, such as Variety who wrote that "the relationship between Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones never takes on real dimensions." The next project was another literary adaptation (this time by F. Scott Fitzgerald), Soft Is the Night (Tender Is the Night), in which she plays Nicole Diver, an emotionally troubled woman who watches her husband fall in love with another woman while in the south of France.

Jones joined the Republican Party and supported Dwight Eisenhower's campaign in the 1952 presidential election.

Final roles and off-screen activity

After Selznick's death in 1965, the actress gradually retired from the big screen. Her first role in four years was her performance in the British drama The Idol (1966), as the mother of a young man from Swinging London, who has an affair with her best friend.

In 1966, Jones made an unusual stage appearance in Clifford Odets's The Country Girl, opposite Rip Torn, at New York's City Center. On November 9, 1967, the same day that her close friend Charles Bickford died of a blood infection, Jones attempted suicide by jumping from a cliff overlooking Malibu beach, after ingesting a large amount of barbiturates. But she fell unconscious beforehand and was found next to the rocks, spending several days in a coma in the hospital. According to her biographer Paul Green, it was the news of Bickford's death that prompted her to attempt suicide. She would return to life. screen in 1969 with the film Angel, Angel, Down We Go about a girl who uses a rock band to manipulate her family.

On May 29, 1971, Jones married her third husband, Norton Simon, a multimillionaire industrialist, art collector, and philanthropist from Portland. The marriage took place aboard a tugboat five miles off the English coast Years earlier, Simon tried to buy the portrait of the actress that had been used in the film Portrait of Jennie. Simon met Jones at a party organized by fellow industrialist and art collector Walter Annenberg.

His last appearance on the big screen was in The Burning Colossus (The Towering Inferno, 1974). A role that would give him his last Globe nomination Gold for best supporting actress. The opening scenes of the film featured paintings loaned to the production by Jones' husband Simon's art gallery.

In May 1976, Jones' daughter, Mary, (21 years old and a student at Occidental College), committed suicide by jumping from the roof of a 22-story apartment hotel in downtown Los Angeles. This tragedy left Jones with lifelong mental disorders.

In 1979, together with her husband Simon (whose son, Robert, also committed suicide in 1969), she founded the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation For Mental Health and Education, which would operate until 2003. One of the main objectives Jones' goal was to stop stigmatizing mental illnesses. In an interview, he confessed that he had been a psychotherapy patient since he was 24 years old, where he also admitted that

I shudder when I admit I've had suicidal tendencies, I had mental problems, but why should I do it?" I hope we can re-educate the world to see that there is no more need for stigma in mental illness than in cancer."

Jones spent the rest of his life away from the public sphere. Four years after her husband's death in June 1993, she resigned as president of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena and was named chair of the Board of Trustees, president and CEO. In 1996, she began working with architect Frank Gehry and exterior designer Nancy Goslee Power to renovate the museum and its gardens. She remained in the position of director of the Norton Simon Museum until 2003, when she was given the position of director emeritus.

Death

Jones had a quiet retirement, living with his eldest son, Robert Walker Jr., and his family in Malibu for his last six years. His youngest son, actor Michael Ross Walker, also died at age 66 of a heart attack on December 23, 2007.^{[citation needed]} He died of natural causes on December 17, 2009 at age 90. She was cremated and her ashes were buried next to her second husband in the Selznick pantheon at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale (California).

The planetoid 6249 Jennifer was named in her honor.

Filmography

Cinema

Prizes and distinctions

Oscar Awards

Gold Globes Awards