Jennifer Jones Biography

Fast Facts

• Her parents were vaudeville performers
• Her father owned a movie-theater chain where her first films would eventually be screened
• Met first husband, actor Robert Walker, while attending American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York
• Was discovered and groomed by Hollywood power producer David O
• Selznick, who cast her in The Song of Bernadette (1943), for which she won an Academy Award
• A love affair with Selznick resulted in divorces from their respective spouses
• An interest in charity work led to an appearance in a little-known wartime documentary short, The Fighting Generation, directed by an uncredited Alfred Hitchcock
• Interested in the part of Aurora Greenway in Larry McMurtry's Terms of Endearment, she purchased the rights to the novel but was considered too old to play the role
• (It went to Shirley MacLaine, who won the Oscar
• ) Took a strong interest in mental-heath issues after the suicides of her daughter Mary and the son of third husband Norton Simon, and established the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation for Mental Health and Education in 1980