Jennifer Jones

His career is not riddled with titles. She barely made Jennifer Jones – born Phylis Lee Isley, in Tulsa, Okalohama, in 1919 – about twenty, before drawing the curtain thirty years ago.

Pretty but not stunning, this big-eyed brunette beauty is linked to producer David Selznick’s name. And not just because the ‘alma mater’ from Gone with the Wind changed her patronymic when launching her career. Legend has it that in 1941 Phylis Isley broke down in tears at a film test. Selznick was passing by, and asked for a new summons from the young woman. Result, a contract for 7 years. That sounded crazy. The girl had only appeared in small roles in Republic films: New Frontier , along with a young John Wayne , and Dick Tracy’s G-Men serial . She hadn’t even completed her theater training. And yet, the producer saw something in that young woman, married two years earlier to the also actorRobert Walker , and that he had two babies, Robert and Walker. And she decided to ‘invent’ Jennifer Jones, put her to work at the Group Theatre. Which placed her in one of the most intense religious films in cinema history: Bernadette’s Song (1943). Henry King ‘s film was based on a book by Jew Franz Werfel , who promised to write it in gratitude for saving his life from the Nazi Holocaust. And the composition of Bernadette Soubirous, a 14-year-old peasant girl to whom the Virgin Mary appears, earned her a fair Oscar. For the first time a newcomer unseated the veterans, Ingrid Bergman , Greer Garson , Joan Fontaine and Jean Arthur .

The success in the cinema did not prevent the marital failure. Jones and Walker divorced in 1944. Which made her only joint work on film, Since You’ve Been Gone, a foreboding title painful. Five years later, Jennifer married Selznick, who went on to shape the career of her wife. What was worth the harsh and excessive judgment of John Huston : “David’s love for Jennifer was authentic and moving, but in it were the seeds of the failures that marked the last years of his life. (…) Since he married her he hasn’t done anything worth a damn again.” To avoid pigeonholing, Jones made successful forays into comedy ( Ernst Lubitsch ‘s The Sin of Cluny Brown ) , romanticism ( Jennie, by William Dieterle ), film noir (alongside Humphrey Bogart and John Huston in The Devil’s Trick ) and the western (his passionate Pearl Chávez in Duel in the Sun , by King Vidor ). Vidor was so pleased that he claimed her for Passion Under the Mist , with Charlton Heston . It highlighted the delivery of the actress: “She could see how she turned pale or how she blushed because of passion or anger.” Jennifer participated in several literary adaptations: Madame Bovary , by Vincente Minnelli , Carrie , by William Wyler , Tender is the night, by Henry King, and A Farewell to Arms (1957) , by Charles Vidor . But they were not the desired successes. And Termini Station , which brought him together with Vittorio de Sica and Monty Clift, did not work either. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jennifer’s career languished as film setbacks and Selznick’s death converged. The revival that promised a happy new marriage and The Colossus on Fire was cut short by the suicide of her daughter. She would not be on camera again, instead devoting her efforts to charity.