Los Angeles - Jennifer Jones, the Hollywood beauty who played against the top lead male actors of her time, has died at age 90 in Malibu, California, outside Los Angeles. The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, named after her second husband and of which Jones was president, confirmed her death Thursday on its internet website. Further details were not available.
During her career, Jones played lead roles against such Hollywood romantic greats as Gregory Peck, William Holden, Humphrey Bogart, Laurence Olivier and others.
Jones' birth name was Phyllis Isley. As a child, her travelling actor-parents left Oklahoma in the late 1930s and moved to Hollywood. The producer of the classic "Gone with the Wind," David O Selznick, invented her stage name and put her in her first major role as a nun in The Song of Bernadette in 1943, for which she received an Oscar in 1944 on her 25th birthday.
Selznick steered her career from then on, marrying her in 1949 on a yacht off the Italian coast and remaining married to her until his death in 1965.
Jones' other films included Duel in the Sun (1946, where she played a half-blood Indian being wood by cattle farmers played by Peck and Joseph Cotten); Madame Bovary (1949); Carrie (1952, with Olivier); Love is a Many Splendored Thing (1955, where she plays a Eurasian doctor from mainland China against Holden's married, but separated, American reporter); Beat the Devil (1954, with Bogart); Ernest Hemingway'sFarewell to Arms (1957, with Rock Hudson); and Tender is the Night (1962, with Jason Robards.)
Jones tried to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills in 1967 two years after Selznick's death, and was found on the Malibu beach near death. Her daughter committed suicide by jumping from a lethal height in 1976. In 1971, Jones married the industrialist and art collector Norton Simon, and when he was confined to a wheelchair by a disease of the nervous system, she overtook leadership of the museum he founded.
