Jennifer Jones, R.I.P.

[dirac]

Jennifer Jones has died at age ninety.

“After that first big role, there was a kind of stage fright,” Ms. Jones said in 1981. She told another interviewer: “When you’re young, you’re full of hope and dreams. Later you begin to wonder. I did ‘The Song of Bernadette’ without knowing what was going on half the time.”

When she made “Bernadette,” Ms. Jones was the wife of the young actor Robert Walker and the mother of two small boys. She and her husband had met as students at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York in 1938 and married a year later. They had struggled together until Selznick put Ms. Jones under personal contract in 1941. A year later, Mr. Walker was signed by MGM and had a star-making debut in 1943 as a young sailor in “Bataan.”

Never a big favorite of mine, but I never minded seeing her and she could be charming. And of course, very pretty. I think she's great in The Song of Bernadette. Also: Cluny Brown, Love Letters. She also appeared in two great camp classics, Ruby Gentry and the deathless Duel in the Sun.

[canbelto]

Jennifer Jones interests me mostly for the heartache she brought to Robert Walker, one of my favorite actors.

[dirac]

He's a favorite of mine, too. But I wouldn't blame it all on Jones.

[dirac]

The more I think about it, the more I think I did not give Jones enough credit. I forgot to add Gone to Earth, a Powell and Pressburger item that Jones’ hubby, David O. Selznick, kept messing with. And she is good in the wonderful Carrie with Olivier, hanging in there even though Olivier is at his very best. We Were Strangers. Indiscretions of an American Wife, although it doesn’t work at all. A very decent body of work.