A brunette beauty with apple cheeks and luminous brown eyes, Jennifer Jones was a sensitive actress with a screen persona that combined shy vulnerability and bold emotion. She was equally convincing as saint or sinner, and some of her best performances blended the two types to create characters who were somewhere between innocent heroine and passionate femme fatale.

Jones was born Phylis Lee Isley on March 2, 1919, in Tulsa, OK. Her interest in acting began as a child, when her parents operated a small theatrical troupe and later ran a chain of movie theaters. She studied theater at Northwestern University in Illinois, then at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. It was at the latter that she met her first husband, actor Robert Walker.

An audition for the play Claudia led Jones into a fateful meeting with producer David O. Selznick, who had the rights to the film version of the play and would become her second husband, as well as an almost Svengali-like influence on her life. Selznick helped her land the coveted leading role in the 20th Century-Fox film that would instantly establish her as a major star: The Song of Bernadette (1943). Jones was incandescent as the French peasant girl who claimed to have had visions of the Virgin Mary. The role earned Jones an Academy Award® for Best Actress.

Under Selznick's supervision, Jones appeared in a series of diverse roles and quickly racked up three more Oscar® nominations: as Supporting Actress in Selznick's production of Since You Went Away (1944) and as Best Actress in Hal B. Wallis's production of William Dieterle's Love Letters (1945) and King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946), in which she first played against type as a fiery "half-breed" named Pearl Chavez. Other significant vehicles of the 1940s included Cluny Brown (1946), Portrait of Jennie (1948), We Were Strangers (1949), and the title role in Vincente Minnelli's MGM version of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1949). It was that year that Jones divorced married Selznick after divorcing Walker four years earlier.

Jones returned to a tempestuous mode for the title role in Ruby Gentry (1952), playing a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who wreaks havoc on a Southern town after being disappointed in love. This film was a boost to her box office appeal, as were the gentle Good Morning, Miss Dove (1955) and the romantic Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), which brought her yet another Best Actress Oscar® nomination.

Rounding out the 1950s for Jones were the comic lark Beat the Devil (1953), the bittersweet romance Indiscretion of an American Wife (1954), the touching (and commercially successful) biography The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1957), and Selznick's Ernest Hemingway adaptation of A Farewell to Arms (1957), with Jones playing the young English nurse to Rock Hudson's WWI American lieutenant. Selznick tried another elaborately produced literary vehicle for his wife with F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1962), but his final two films--each interesting in its own way--were not box-office successes.

After Selznick's death in 1965, Jones entered semi-retirement and would make only a few more film appearances. In 1971 she married wealthy industrialist/art collector Norton Simon and became Chairman, President and Executive Officer of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, CA. Simon died in 1993, and Jones passed away in 2009 at age 90. She was the mother of two sons (including actor Robert Walker Jr.) and a daughter. Always modest and unassuming, she remarked in a 1977 interview that "Actually, every time I stop to think about it, I'm really amazed. I think I've had an extraordinary life. And lots of times I can hardly believe it's me."

By Roger Fristoe