Jennifer Jones RIP

Jennifer Jones, who won an Academy Award for playing a saint in "The Song of Bernadette" and became a popular sinner in Hollywood melodramas, including "Duel in the Sun" and "Love is a Many-Splendored Thing," died Thursday at her home in Malibu, Calif. She was 90.

Miss Jones, who in her later years was a leader of the Norton Simon Museum, in Pasadena, died of natural causes, museum spokeswoman Leslie Denk said.

Miss Jones was the widow of the museum's founder, industrialist Norton Simon, and served as chair of the museum's board of directors after his death.

Known for her intense performances, Miss Jones was one of Hollywood's biggest stars of the 1940s and '50s.

Among her most memorable roles were the vixen who vamps rowdy cowboy Gregory Peck in "Duel in the Sun," and the Eurasian doctor who falls for Korean War correspondent William Holden in "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing."

Miss Jones conveyed an aura of shyness, even aloofness, offstage. She rarely gave interviews, explaining in 1957: "Most interviewers probe and pry into your personal life, and I just don't like it. I respect everyone's right to privacy, and I feel mine should be respected, too."

Early in her career, Miss Jones had become nearly as famous for her high-profile marriages as for her movie work. She met actor Robert Walker when both studied acting in New York, and they married and went to Hollywood, where her stardom ascended more rapidly than his.

Her boss, David O. Selznick, became obsessed with his star and spent much of his time promoting her career; some critics say he helped ruin it, too. The two married four years after she divorced Walker in 1945.

Selznick died in 1965, and in 1973 Miss Jones married Simon. After his death in 1993, she assumed a major role in leading the Pasadena-based museum.

She initiated the museum's celebrated gallery renovation by architect Frank Gehry and spearheaded the development of its public programming and outreach initiatives.

She was born Phylis Isley on March 2, 1919, in Tulsa, Okla., to parents who operated a touring stock company that presented melodramas in tent theaters in the Southwest. She began doing roles in their plays at age 6.

After graduating from high school, she toured with another stock company, studied drama at Northwestern University for a year and persuaded her father to support her for a year at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.

She married Walker in 1939, and they spent their honeymoon traveling to Hollywood. They could find only bit roles in small pictures, she in a western, "New Frontier," and a serial, "Dick Tracy's G-Men."

The pair retreated to New York before Miss Jones was selected for the prize role in "The Song of Bernadette" about a French peasant girl who claimed to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in 1858.

Her performance and the Oscar for best actress helped make her one of Hollywood's most popular leading ladies.

Director Henry King recalled testing the six finalists for the role of Bernadette: "A man held a stick behind the camera; the girls focused their rapt attention on that stick. The other five did very well. But only Jennifer looked as if she saw the vision."

Among her 27 films, she is also remembered as the ghostly beauty who attracts painter Joseph Cotten in "Portrait of Jennie" and as a world-class swindler in John Huston's "Beat the Devil," with Humphrey Bogart as a rival adventurer seeking uranium riches in Africa.

Among her other films were "Love Letters" (with Cotten), "We Were Strangers" (with John Garfield), "Madame Bovary" (with Louis Jourdan) and "A Farewell to Arms" (with Rock Hudson).

In "Carrie," William Wyler's version of Theodore Dreiser's novel "Sister Carrie," Miss Jones held the screen well with Laurence Olivier playing her self-destructive lover. But Miss Jones' character, a crafty opportunist in the book, became a more-sympathetic role on-screen that offended Dreiser purists.

Meanwhile, she lost important roles that Selznick deemed unworthy, including parts that made stars of Eva Marie Saint in "On the Waterfront" and Julie Harris in "East of Eden." Selznick also alienated many directors with demanding memos and on-set fretting about lighting, costumes and script changes to benefit Miss Jones.

Film scholar Jeanine Basinger, who specializes in the history of women in cinema, said, "One of the tragedies of Jennifer Jones' career is that she will always be viewed through the filter of David O. Selznick."

Miss Jones received a supporting actress Oscar nomination for "Since You Went Away," and lead actress nominations for "Love Letters," "Duel in the Sun" and "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing."

While in Rome filming "A Farewell to Arms," Hudson told a reporter, "I heard fantastic stories about this girl, that she was neurotic, temperamental, under hypnosis by Selznick. Not a word of truth in any of it. From the first take, she's been cooperative with everyone, except reporters."

Her last film under Selznick's guidance came in 1962 with F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night," a failure.

Several months after Selznick's death in 1965, she went to England to film "The Idol." She made only two more film appearances, in 1969's "Angel, Angel, Down We Go" and 1974's "The Towering Inferno."

Miss Jones, who admitted to "mental problems" and was known to have twice attempted suicide, became an advocate of mental-health funding. Her only child from Selznick, Mary Jennifer Selznick, jumped to her death from a Los Angeles office building in 1976.

Survivors include a son from her first marriage, Robert Walker, of Malibu; a stepson, Donald Simon, of Los Angeles; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. A son from her first marriage, Michael Walker, died in 2007.

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