Jennifer Jones, an actress who won an Academy Award for playing a saint in The Song of Bernadette and became a popular sinner in Hollywood melodramas including Duel in the Sun and Love is a Many-Splendored Thing died on Thursday at her home in Malibu, Calif. She was 90.
Few actresses have launched their careers with more fanfare than Jones, who received a huge publicity buildup for her first major film, The Song of Bernadette (1943). She played a 19th-century French peasant girl who sees visions of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes and defies Catholic Church authorities who claim she is a fraud.
In her prime, Jones was among the screen's great beauties, a striking brunette with a husky voice and ethereal stare. But there was also a sensitive, at times vulnerable, quality that broadened her appeal across genres.
After The Song of Bernadette Jones played a charming home-front ingenue who faces wartime realities in Since You Went Away (1944) and a servant girl with a zest for plumbing in Ernst Lubitsch's Cluny Brown (1946).
Among her 27 films, she is also remembered as the ghostly beauty who attracts painter Joseph Cotten in Portrait of Jennie (1948) and as a world-class swindler in John Huston's Beat the Devil (1953), with Humphrey Bogart as a rival adventurer seeking uranium riches in Africa.
{{/usCountry}}Among her 27 films, she is also remembered as the ghostly beauty who attracts painter Joseph Cotten in Portrait of Jennie (1948) and as a world-class swindler in John Huston's Beat the Devil (1953), with Humphrey Bogart as a rival adventurer seeking uranium riches in Africa.
{{/usCountry}}