LOS ANGELES — Jennifer Jones, the beautiful, raven- haired actress who was nominated for Academy Awards five times, winning in 1943 for her portrayal of a saintly nun in “The Song of Bernadette,” died Thursday. She was 90.
Jones, who in later years was a leader of the Norton Simon Museum, died at her home in Malibu of natural causes, museum spokeswoman Leslie Denk told The Associated Press.
Jones was the widow of the museum’s founder, industrialist Norton Simon, and served as chairwoman of the board of directors after his death.
Known for her intense performances, Jones was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the 1940s and ’50s.
Among her most memorable roles were the half-breed vixen who vamps rowdy cowboy Gregory Peck in “Duel in the Sun,” and the Eurasian doctor who falls for Korean War correspondent William Holden in “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.”
Among her other films were “Love Letters” (with Joseph Cotten), “We Were Strangers” (with John Garfield), “Madame Bovary” (with Louis Jourdan) and “A Farewell to Arms” (with Rock Hudson).
Early on, Jones became nearly as famous for her marriages as for her film work. She met actor Robert Walker when both studied acting in New York. They married and came to Hollywood, where her stardom ascended more rapidly than his.
Jones’ boss, David O. Selznick, became obsessed with his star and spent much of his time promoting her career. They married four years after she divorced Walker in 1945.
Selznick died in 1965, and in 1973, Jones married Simon. After his death in 1993, she assumed a major role in leading the Pasadena-based museum. She initiated the museum’s celebrated gallery renovation by architect Frank Gehry and spearheaded the development of its public programming and outreach initiatives.
She was born Phylis Isley on March 2, 1919, in Tulsa, Okla., to parents who operated a touring stock company that presented melodramas in tent theaters in the Southwest. She began doing roles in their plays at the age of 6.
After graduating from a Catholic high school, she toured with another stock company, studied drama at Northwestern University in Chicago for a year, then persuaded her father to support her for a year at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.
She and Walker found only bit parts when they went to Hollywood in 1939, so they retreated to New York before Jones got the lead in “The Song of Bernadette” about a French peasant girl who claimed to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in 1858. Her performance and the Oscar helped make her one of the most popular leading ladies.
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