Jones had a long career in pictures, winning her Oscar for her performance in The Song of Bernadette. She was first married to doomed actor Robert Walker (Strangers on a Train) and had two sons with him before dumping him to marry producer David O. Selznick.
After Selznick died in 1965, she married industrialist and zillionaire Norton Simon. They remained married until he died in 1993.
Jones also had some tragedy in her life:
In 1967, Ms. Jones made headlines when she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and was discovered, near death, lying in the surf at Malibu. In 1976, Ms. Jones’s 21- year-old daughter, Mary Jennifer Selznick, jumped to her death from a building in West Los Angeles.
One of her sons with Robert Walker died in 2007.
About Selznick:
He found the young actress a new name and began grooming her for stardom, finding Jones her first big role in "Bernadette" and, afterward, producing or choosing most of her films. He endlessly pestered Hollywood with his memos about her makeup, her camera angles, her costumes. She was his protégé, his obsession, his crusade, eventually his lover and, finally, his wife.
His adoration of her, said film critic David Thomson, shaped the rest of his life and fueled "one of the great gossip-column melodramas of the time."
"She was an ardent young actress before she met Selznick," Thomson wrote in his "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film." "But it is hard now to be sure whether we would know her if his great wind had not picked her up like a leaf."
Selznick tried very hard to strike gold twice after his huge success with Gone With the Wind when he came up with Duel in the Sun, which Jones co-starred with Joseph Cotten and Gregory Peck (in one of the latter's worst performances as lewd Lewt), but Selznick struck out.
A clip from this timeless turkey:
This is the unintentionally hilarious ending, though in Italian or something, but you don't need the dialogue to know how stupid this ending is:
2 comments:
I adored Jennifer Jones.. She was so beautiful and had such a fabulous presence on screen. She was particularly awesome in Beat in the Devil, which also starred Bogart; but my favourite role of hers was Pearl in Duel in the Sun.
She seemed to have a lot of class and valued her privacy.
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