Jennifer Jones

Jennifer Jones (born Phylis Lee Isley; March 2, 1919 – December 17, 2009), also known as Jennifer Jones Simon, was an American actress and mental health advocate. Over the course of her career that spanned over five decades, she was nominated for the Oscar five times, including one win for Best Actress, as well as a Golden Globe Award win for Best Actress in a Drama. Jones is among the youngest actresses to receive an Academy Award, having won on her 25th birthday.A native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Jones worked as a model in her youth before transitioning to acting, appearing in two serial films in 1939. Her third role was a lead part as Bernadette Soubirous in The Song of Bernadette (1943), which earned her the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Actress that year. She went on to star in several films that garnered her significant critical acclaim and a further three Academy Award nominations in the mid 1940s, including Since You Went Away (1944), Love Letters (1945), and Duel in the Sun (1946).In 1949, Jones married film producer David O. Selznick, and appeared as the titular Madame Bovary in Vincente Minnellis 1949 adaptation. She appeared in several films throughout the 1950s, including Ruby Gentry (1952), John Hustons adventure comedy Beat the Devil (1953), and Vittorio De Sicas drama Terminal Station (also 1953). Jones earned her fifth Academy Award nomination for her performance as a Eurasian doctor in Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955).After Selznicks death in 1965, Jones married industrialist Norton Simon and went into semi-retirement. She made her final film appearance in The Towering Inferno (1974). Jones suffered from mental health problems during her life and survived a 1966 suicide attempt in which she jumped from a cliff in Malibu Beach. After her own daughter committed suicide in 1976, Jones became profoundly interested in mental health education. In 1980, she founded the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation for Mental Health and Education. She spent the remainder of her life withdrawn from the public, residing in Malibu, California, where she died in 2009, aged 90.

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