Opening with comedy auteur Ernst Lubitsch’s late masterpiece Cluny Brown and including a new 35mm restoration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Gone to Earth, the series presents 14 classic films starring the award-winning 1940s and ’50s actor. Several special guests will introduce selected films, including critics Molly Haskell and Andrew Sarris, historian and Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne, Academy Award-winning film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, producer Daniel Selznick and Jennifer Jones biographer Edward Z. Epstein.
Jennifer Jones was born Phylis Isley in Tulsa, Okla., in 1919, taking the experiences of her childhood in a show business family to New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Though she met and married her first husband, actor Robert Walker, in New York in 1939, her attempts at breaking onto the stage were short-lived: Jones appeared in her first Hollywood film, New Frontier, a B-movie Western starring John Wayne, the same year as her wedding. Soon discovered by mogul David O. Selznick, she rocketed to stardom in The Song of Bernadette.
She soon displayed a gift for comedy starring alongside Charles Boyer in 1946’s Cluny Brown (also showing as part of the upcoming Film Society series Charles Boyer and The Art of Seduction, May 23-27), as well as a remarkable talent for melodrama, captivating audiences with her depictions of psychological turmoil and vulnerability in such films as Madame Bovary (1949), Gone to Earth (1950) and Carrie (1952).
Henry Koster’s Good Morning, Miss Dove (1955) attracted Jones’s most remarkable advocate, author Henry Miller, who praised the “other-worldly world” in which Jones lived onscreen. “A world not unknown to tigers, llamas, unicorns and the like. Thank God I have not yet seen all the films in which Jennifer Jones starred...To me she is like a coin fresh from the mint, whether playing the angel, the minx or just her thousand year old self.”
Yet, the public interest in Jones’s relationship with Selznick often outpaced her reputation as talented and distinctive actress. The pair married in 1949, while Jones appeared in such Selznick-produced projects as Since You Went Away (1944), the boldly sexual Duel in the Sun (1946) and Portrait of Jennie (1948). She earned four additional Oscar nominations, the last coming in 1956 for Love is a Many-Splendored Thing. Jones and Selznick remained married until Selznick’s death in 1965.
By the late ’60s, Jones had virtually retired from Hollywood acting. She married millionaire art collector Norton Simon in 1971, three years before her final onscreen appearance in The Towering Inferno. She remains active advocating for the rights of the mentally ill and as a director of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.
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