LOS ANGELES, (Reuters Life!) – Jennifer Jones, the American leading lady who won an Oscar for playing Saint Bernadette in the 1943 movie “The Song of Bernadette”, died at her home in Malibu yesterday at age 90.
Jones enjoyed a critically-acclaimed career in the 1940s and 1950s, including being controversially cast as a bi-racial woman in “Duel in the Sun”. Her leading men included Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier, Humphrey Bogart and Rock Hudson, with whom she starred in the 1957 war movie “A Farewell to Arms”.
Jones was married three times, including to influential “Gone With the Wind” producer David O. Selznick and industrialist Norton Simon whose art collection became the basis for the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. A spokesman for the museum announced Jones’s death of natural causes.
The actress made her last screen appearance in “The Towering Inferno” in 1974, where she danced with Fred Astaire before a fire engulfed party-goers in a skyscraper.
