Jennifer Jones — Actress, The Intensity That David O. Selznick Built a Career Around

Biography

From Tulsa to Bernadette's Lourdes

Born Phylis Lee Isley on March 2, 1919, in Tulsa, Oklahoma — the daughter of a theatre and film exhibitor who put her in front of audiences from childhood. She married actor Robert Walker in 1939, arrived in Hollywood with him, and attracted the attention of David O. Selznick — the producer responsible for Gone with the Wind — who signed her, changed her name to Jennifer Jones, divorced his wife, and proceeded to manage every aspect of her career with an obsessiveness that was simultaneously the source of her greatest opportunities and the constraint that occasionally prevented her from fully inhabiting them.

Henry King's The Song of Bernadette (1943) — the story of Bernadette Soubirous, the Lourdes visionary who reported seeing the Virgin Mary — gave her a role for which the combination of spiritual intensity and physical delicacy she was capable of was perfectly suited. She was twenty-four, had no major screen credits, and won the Academy Award for Best Actress over Ingrid Bergman, Joan Fontaine, Greer Garson, and Lana Turner. The win announced a major talent; Selznick immediately set about controlling its development with the complete attention of a man who believed he knew better than the actress what she should be doing.

King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946) — Selznick's deliberately provocative attempt to make a Western as operatic as Gone with the Wind — cast her as Pearl Chavez, the mixed-race half-breed who is the object of two brothers' desire and who ends the film crawling through the desert toward the man who has shot her to shoot him in return. The performance is the most extravagant thing she ever did; the role required exactly the intensity that Selznick had found in her and had been both promoting and mismanaging.

William Dieterle's Love Letters (1945), Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary (1949), and Henry King's Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) demonstrated the range that Selznick's management had both revealed and constrained. She married Selznick in 1949 after her divorce from Robert Walker; he died in 1965; she survived him by forty-four years, eventually living quietly in Malibu and declining all interviews. She died on December 17, 2009, in Malibu, aged ninety.

1919

Born Phylis Isley in Tulsa; father a theatre exhibitor; stages from childhood

1939

Marries Robert Walker; Hollywood; Selznick notices; name changes

1943

The Song of Bernadette — first major role; Oscar won; the arrival

1945

Love Letters — second nomination; Dieterle; the range widening

1946

Duel in the Sun — Pearl Chavez; the operatic extreme; Selznick's vision

1949

Marries Selznick; Madame Bovary; the Minnelli collaboration

2009

Dies in Malibu; age 90; all interviews declined; forty-four years without Selznick

Filmography

From Bernadette to Pearl Chavez

1943Spiritual Drama · Henry King · Lourdes

The Song of Bernadette

Henry King's adaptation — Jones as Bernadette Soubirous, the young Lourdes woman who reported seeing the Virgin Mary and was persecuted, examined, and eventually recognised by a Church reluctant to believe its own doctrine. Her first major role; the Academy Award over Ingrid Bergman; the announcement of a talent that Selznick would spend the next decade simultaneously celebrating and managing.

Oscar Win

Bernadette's specific quality — the directness of a person who has seen something and knows what she saw, the inability to deny it no matter who interrogates her — required an actress capable of playing spiritual conviction without irony, which is among the most technically difficult things cinema asks of a performer. Jones plays it as simple fact: Bernadette doesn't argue for what she saw; she simply insists on it, calmly and completely. The performance established the quality that Selznick recognised — the intensity that could read as either vision or pathology depending on the context — and that he would spend the rest of her career trying to find roles for.

1946Western · King Vidor · Selznick

Duel in the Sun

King Vidor's operatic Western — Jones as Pearl Chavez, the mixed-race woman whose presence at a Texas ranch sets two brothers against each other and against everyone around them. Selznick's deliberate attempt to make a Western as grand as Gone with the Wind; Jones' most extravagant performance; the most extreme use of the intensity that Bernadette had revealed.

Oscar Nom

Pearl Chavez's final crawl — shot through the desert toward the man who has shot her, dragging herself across the scrub to reach him and shoot him in return — is the operatic extreme of what Jones was capable of: a passion play staged as a Western, the intensity pushed past the point where ordinary naturalism could contain it. The film was critically derided and commercially enormous; "Lust in the Dust" was the contemporary title; Selznick considered it one of his finest productions. All three responses are defensible.

1949Drama · Vincente Minnelli · Flaubert

Madame Bovary

Vincente Minnelli's Flaubert adaptation — Jones as Emma Bovary, the provincial doctor's wife whose romantic fantasies and financial recklessness destroy her marriage and eventually herself. Her finest sustained dramatic performance: the role that demanded the widest range and received the most complete expression of what she was capable of when the material matched her intensity.

Oscar Nom

Emma Bovary is one of literature's most demanding roles — a woman whose psychology is self-deceiving in ways she can never recognise, whose romanticism is both the film's subject and the trap that destroys her — and Jones plays the self-deception without the protective irony that would make the character safer to watch. Minnelli's direction and Jones' performance together produce the American cinema's most psychologically honest portrait of female romanticism as a form of self-destruction.

1955Romance · Henry King · Hong Kong

Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing

Henry King's Hong Kong romance — Jones as Dr. Han Suyin, the Eurasian doctor who falls in love with an American journalist during the Korean War. Her fifth Oscar nomination and her most romantically straightforward role: the film that demonstrated her capacity for warmth beneath the intensity, and that became a popular success of a kind the more demanding Selznick productions had occasionally missed.

Oscar Nom

Han Suyin's position — the woman between worlds, belonging completely to neither the Chinese nor the Western culture she navigates — is the film's central dramatic fact, and Jones plays the in-between quality with a specificity that prevents the role from collapsing into romance-novel generality. The title song became one of the era's most successful, which somewhat overshadowed the performance; the performance is more interesting than the song suggests.

Honors

One Oscar — Five Nominations — The Career Selznick Shaped

Academy Award — Best Actress

1944

The Song of Bernadette

Won for Bernadette Soubirous — her first major screen role, over Ingrid Bergman, Joan Fontaine, Greer Garson, and Lana Turner. The most surprising Oscar win of the 1940s and the one that announced a talent of genuine distinction, immediately and completely managed by the man who had discovered it.

Oscar Won

Five Oscar Nominations

1944 · 1945 · 1947 · 1952 · 1956

Career Span

Bernadette, Love Letters, Duel in the Sun, Carrie, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing — five nominations across twelve years, each for a role of different character, confirming a range that the Selznick productions' intensity occasionally obscured

5 Nominations

The Selznick Management

1941 — 1965

The Producer's Vision

David O. Selznick's obsessive creative management of her career — his casting decisions, his script notes, his constant interventions — both made her major film career possible and placed it within constraints that occasionally prevented her from fully expressing what the best roles revealed. The relationship was complete: personal, professional, and entirely controlling.

Twenty-Four Years

The Quiet Ending

1965 — 2009

Forty-Four Years of Privacy

After Selznick died in 1965 she gradually withdrew from public life, eventually declining all interviews and living quietly in Malibu. Forty-four years of privacy after a career that was never entirely her own. She died at ninety, having survived Selznick by more than four decades.

Forty-Four Years

Artistic Identity

The Intensity That Selznick Found and Managed

The Spiritual Quality

The specific quality that The Song of Bernadette required — the capacity to play conviction without self-consciousness, to inhabit a belief without explaining it — is the rarest thing in screen acting because it cannot be manufactured. Jones had it, Selznick recognised it, and the career was built on its various expressions: Bernadette's vision, Pearl's passion, Emma's romanticism.

The Selznick Paradox

The producer who gave her the Oscar role, changed her name, and married her also managed her career with a completeness that occasionally prevented her from expressing what the best roles revealed. The Selznick productions are simultaneously her greatest opportunities and the frame that constrained what she could do within them — the paradox of a career built on someone else's vision.

The Range Behind the Intensity

Bernadette, Pearl Chavez, Emma Bovary, Han Suyin — four roles of entirely different character, connected only by the quality of intensity that Jones brought to all of them. The range the nominations represent is wider than the Selznick association suggests; the films he made her choose were not the only ones she could have inhabited.

The Long Privacy

The forty-four years after Selznick's death — quiet, private, interview-free — are as characteristic as the career that preceded them. A woman who had spent twenty-four years under the most complete creative management in Hollywood history chose, when that management ended, to manage herself into invisibility. The quiet is the last thing she controlled entirely.

Legacy

One Oscar — Five Nominations — The Career She Might Have Had

Jennifer Jones' legacy is the tension between what she was and what she was managed into being — the five nominations and one Oscar that represent genuine achievement, and the question of what a career unconstrained by Selznick's obsessive vision might have looked like. Bernadette and Emma Bovary are performances of rare quality; Duel in the Sun is a performance pushed to its operatic extreme; Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing demonstrated warmth the more demanding films had occasionally suppressed.

She survived Selznick by forty-four years and spent them in a privacy that was clearly chosen and clearly sufficient. The career was simultaneously too managed and genuinely distinguished; the woman who won the Oscar for her first major role and received four more nominations across twelve years deserves recognition on her own terms, which Selznick's shadow occasionally prevented and which time has begun to restore.

Academy Award Won

The Song of Bernadette, 1944

Oscar Nominations

Across twelve years

Years After Selznick's Death

1965 to 2009 · Private life

Age at Death

December 17, 2009, Malibu