Jennifer Jones

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. Her first notable award and nomination was by Picturegoer Awards, as she won Best Actress of the year. Over the course of her career that spanned more than five decades, she was also nominated for an Academy Award five times, including one win for Best Actress, and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama.

A native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Jones worked as a model in her youth before transitioning to acting, appearing in a western and serial in 1939. She remained off the screen until 1943. Her third role was a lead part as Bernadette Soubirous in The Song of Bernadette (1943), which earned her the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Actress. She went on to star in several films that garnered her significant critical acclaim and a further three Academy Award nominations in the mid-1940s, including Since You Went Away (1944), Love Letters (1945) and Duel in the Sun (1946).

In 1949, Jones married film producer David O. Selznick and appeared as the eponymous Madame Bovary in Vincente Minnelli's 1949 adaptation. She appeared in several films throughout the 1950s, including Ruby Gentry (1952), John Huston's adventure comedy Beat the Devil (1953) and Vittorio De Sica's drama Terminal Station (1953). Jones earned her fifth Academy Award nomination for her performance as a Eurasian doctor in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955). After Selznick's death in 1965, Jones married industrialist Norton Simon and entered semi-retirement. She made her final film appearance in The Towering Inferno (1974), a performance which earned her a nomination for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture.

Jones suffered from mental-health problems during her life. After her 22-year-old daughter, Mary Jennifer Selznick, took her own life in 1976, Jones became deeply involved in mental health education. In 1980, she founded the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation for Mental Health and Education. Jones enjoyed a quiet retirement, living the last six years of her life in Malibu, California, where she died of natural causes in 2009 at the age of 90.