Jennifer Jones

JENNIFER JONES d2009. 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 for Best Actress. She is amongst the youngest actresses to receive an Academy Award, having won on her 25th birthday. She 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, she married film producer David O Selznick and appeared as the eponymous Madame Bovary. She appeared in several films throughout the 1950s, including ; Ruby Gentry (1952) / Beat The Devil (1953) and Terminal Station (1953). She earned her fifth Academy Award nomination for her performance in Love is a Many Splendored Thing (1955). After Selznick's death in 1965, she married industrialist Norton Simon and went into semi-retirement. She made her final film appearance in The Towering Inferno (1974). Jennifer 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, she became profoundly interested in mental health education. In 1980, she founded the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation for Mental Health and Education. She enjoyed a quiet retirement, living for the last six years of her life in Malibu California where she died of natural causes on December 17th 2009, aged 90