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Jones News
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Turner
Classic Movies to feature Jennifer Jones on the Seventh Edition
of Popular SUMMER UNDER THE STARS
Each August,
movie fans come out of the sun and park themselves on the
sofa for the latest edition of Turner Classic Movies’
(TCM) ultimate movie star showcase: SUMMER UNDER THE STARS.
Returning for its seventh year, the festival dedicates each
of its 31 days to one of Hollywood’s most enduring personalities.
Assembled from the network’s library of more than 5,000
films, this one-of-a-kind festival is an opportunity for viewers
to enjoy a varied selection from each star’s body of
work, uncut and commercial free.
Monday, August
17, is Jennifer Jones day! Twelve of her films will be shown
beginning at 6 am eastern time. Be sure to check out the TCM
website which features an interesting essay on each of
the films being shown.

Jennifer Jones Simon attended the Hereditary
Disease Foundation's 40th Birthday Gala in January 2008. She
is seen here with HDF President Nancy Wexler. If you are interested
in helping to support the foundation, visit their website.
The following is from a recent newsletter from the Hereditary
Disease Foundation:
"The Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation has pledged $400,000
at the rate of $100,000 per year over the next four years to be
used exclusively for our world renowned Mary Jennifer Selznick
Workshop Program, named in honor of Jennifer Jones Simon’s
late daughter. This generous endowment ensures the continuing
success of our unique workshops. These small, informal, free-wheeling
workshops foster dialogue among researchers from a variety of
fields, who come without prepared lectures or slides to converse
across disciplinary borders. Jennifer has been a critical member
of the HDF family since she served on the Congressional Commission
for the Control of Huntington’s Disease and its Consequences
in 1976. We appreciate her loyalty and championship of beginning
and established scientists worldwide who have, in turn, been graced
by her presence at workshops, many in her own home with its stellar
art collection."
(Note:
An article about Jennifer Jones will appear in the May issue of
Film Comment by film scholar Miriam Bale)
Tribute
to Jennifer Jones at the Film Society of Lincoln Center
Saint
and Sinner: The Tempestuous Career of Jennifer Jones
May 16-24 at the Walter Reade Theater
NEW YORK,
April 23, 2008––The Film Society of Lincoln Center
returns to the Golden Age of Hollywood this spring, beginning
with Saint and Sinner: The Tempestuous Career of Jennifer
Jones at the Walter Reade Theater, May 16–24.
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.
In addition
to spotlighting the myriad roles Jones portrayed throughout her
career, Saint and Sinner showcases some of cinema’s
most inventive and exciting directorial talents. These include
John Huston (Beat the Devil), Vincente Minnelli (Madame
Bovary), King Vidor (Duel in the Sun, Ruby Gentry),
William Wyler (Carrie), and Henry King, who directed
Jones in her first starring role, an Academy Award-winning performance
as a saintly French peasant persecuted for her reports of angelic
visitations in The Song of Bernadette.
“Jennifer
represented a woman of mystery,” says Joanna Ney, producer
of arts programming at the Film Society and the curator of the
series. “Her sui generis performances captured compassionate,
vulnerable and sometimes bitter heroines who were also—though
they did not mean to be—femme fatales, because her feminine
drive challenged the guy in question.”
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.
A series
pass is available for Saint and Sinner: The Tempestuous Career
of Jennifer Jones combined with the Film Society’s
following series, “Charles Boyer an the Art of Seduction.”
The pass admits one person to a total of five titles in the two
series, May 16–27. They are $40; $30 for Film Society members,
and available only at the Walter Reade Theater box office (cash
only).
Single screening
tickets for the series are $11; $7 for Film Society members, students
and children (6-12, accompanied by an adult); and $8 for seniors
(62+). They are available at both the Walter Reade Theater box
office and online at www.filmlinc.com.
The Film
Society of Lincoln Center was founded in 1969 to celebrate American
and international cinema, to recognize and support new directors,
and to enhance the awareness, accessibility and understanding
of film. Advancing this mandate today, the Film Society hosts
two distinguished festivals: the New York Film Festival, which
annually premieres the best films from around the world and has
introduced the likes of François Truffaut, R.W. Fassbinder,
Jean-Luc Godard, Pedro Almodóvar, Martin Scorsese, and
Wong Kar-Wai to the United States, and New Directors/New Films,
co-presented by the Museum of Modern Art, which focuses on emerging
film talents. Since 1972 when the Film Society honored Charles
Chaplin, the annual Gala Tribute celebrates an actor, filmmaker
or industry leader who has helped distinguish cinema as an art
form. Additionally, the Film Society presents a year-round calendar
of programming at its Walter Reade Theater and offers insightful
film writing to a worldwide audience through Film Comment magazine.
Film
fest focuses on Jones, Selznick
Norfolk,
Virginia, July 9, 2006
A FILM FESTIVAL
to showcase one of the more intriguing partnerships in film
history opens Monday, led by Virginian-Pilot movie critic Mal
Vincent.
A rare theatrical
screening of the spectacle "Duel in the Sun," starring
Jennifer Jones and produced by David O. Selznick, opens the
festival at 7:15 p.m.
It is the
first of six features in the Jennifer Jones-David O. Selznick
Film Festival, which runs for six consecutive Monday nights
at the Naro Expanded Cinema in Norfolk.
Jones, who
earned five Academy Award nominations and one subsequent Oscar,
remains one of the more mysterious and complex actresses in
film lore because she has seldom granted interviews. Her last
film was "The Towering Inferno" in 1974, yet her place
in film history grows. She now is chairman of the board of the
Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., and is active in social
and charitable causes. She has been invited to the festival.
As the producer
of "Gone With the Wind" and "Rebecca," which
won best-picture Oscars for 1939 and 1940, Selznick was the
most powerful man in Hollywood when he signed the girl from
Oklahoma to an exclusive contract. She was married (to actor
Robert Walker) and the mother of two sons when she met the producer.
He spent the rest of his life promoting and managing her career.
They were married from 1949 until his death in 1965 - years
that included the major films of her career. Her marriage to
millionaire art collector Norton Simon came later.
"Duel
in the Sun," a steamy western released in 1946 about a
young woman who comes between two brothers, was initially panned
by critics but became a box office success. It has gained respect
over the years, and director Martin Scorsese said it influenced
film forever. It was made for the sole purpose of changing Jennifer
Jones' saintly image, which she acquired from playing the lead
role in "The Song of Bernadette."
"Duel
in the Sun" achieved that purpose. It was banned by censors
and the Catholic Church, although it was tame by today's standards.
The all-star
cast includes Gregory Peck, Virginia's own Joseph Cotten (a
native of Pet ersburg), Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Butterfly
McQueen, Herbert Marshall and Charles Bickford, with narration
by Orson Welles.
All screenings
will include discussions before and after the films, led by
Vincent. He will give talks on the real-life as well as the
on-screen intrigue of the Jones- Selz?nick pairing.
Naro managers
said the search for theatrical prints of the films has been
exhaustive, and this is likely the last time any of the films
will be seen in a theater and on the big screen.
The festival
will continue on July 24 with the MGM production "Madame
Bovary," in which Jones stars with Van Heflin and Louis
Jordan. "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing" screens
on July 31.
Aug. 7 is
North Carolina night with "Ruby Gentry" starring Jones
and Charlton Heston in a drama set in a small North Carolina
seaport town.
The families
of military veterans are honored with a screening of Selznick's
World War II drama of the home front, "Since You Went Away,"
on Aug. 14. It stars Jones with her then-husband Walker .
The festival
will close Aug. 21 with the film that made Jones a star and
won her the Academy Award, "The Song of Bernadette."
The complete
schedule is as follows:
July 17
– Duel in the Sun
July 24
Madame Bovary
July 31
Love is a Many-Splendored Thing
Aug. 7 Ruby
Gentry
Aug. 14
Since You Went Away
Aug. 21
Song of Bernadette
Selznick/Jones
home featured in new book
| HOLLYWOOD
LIFE features photos from LIFE photographer Eliot Elisofon
and contains 4 full page color photos of David Selznick
and Jennifer Jones' famous home on Tower Road (which sadly
is no longer in existence). In addition, there are essays
written about these fabulous homes. Of particular interest
here is an interview with Brooke Hayward (wife of Dennis
Hopper and daughter of Margaret Sullavan and Leland Hayward)
who lived in the guest house at Tower Road for several months
following a fire that destroyed her own home. She writes: |
|
"There
were these upside down Italian carafes suspended in ornamental
wrought iron holders with red wine poised on one side and white
wine on the other. You stuck your glass underneath whichever
color you wanted and a button released the wine. It was the
first time I'd really had expensive wine and normally when you
have really expensive wine, the wine bottle is put on the table
so you can see the label. Not here. Jennifer would never appear
at these parties until quite late in the evening. David O. would
assign a guest to be the hostess at each table. He was a fabulous
host. He just loved giving parties. We'd have dinner and Jennifer
would appear around dessert time, because she would have been
downstairs endlessly changing outfits. But then she would make
this fabulous entrance in this glamorous, gorgeous dress. She'd
sort of swish around down this long room saying hello. She would
not sit down. Then she'd go down to change again. Often, I saw
her in three or four different outfits by the end of the evening.
It was fabulous because it was everything that was left of old
Hollywood."
Another
snippet by designer Leonard Stanley:
"...Tony
(Duquette) and I were up at the Selznick's talking about doing
a few things in the living room. Jennifer went downstairs and
came back dragging on the floor four Charles James ball gowns
and the most beautiful dress from Christian Dior's second collection.
It was tulle and blue satin, and she said, "Well, I'll
never wear them again. Why don't we cut them up and make pillows."
Tony said, "Jennifer, these Charles James belong in a museum!"
David
O. Selznick Gets Hollywood Walk of Fame Star
by BOB THOMAS,
Associated Press Writer
Oct. 27,
2004
Even though
he produced "Gone with the Wind" and other movie classics,
David O. Selznick never had his own star on Hollywood's Walk
of Fame.
That oversight
was corrected Tuesday when the Producers Guild sponsored the
late producer's star on Hollywood Boulevard, a half-block from
Grauman's Chinese theater where many of his films played.
"David
Selznick should have been among the first 1,500 names when the
Walk of Fame was started in 1960," commented Walk impresario
Johnny Grant, adding that the event finally "remedied that
unbelievable omission."
Daniel Selznick,
who unveiled the star, admitted that "my father's feelings
were hurt that he wasn't included."
Two performers
from "Gone with the Wind" were among the small gathering in
front of the Roosevelt Hotel: Ann Rutherford, who played Scarlett's
sister, and Cammee King, the ill-fated young daughter of Scarlett
and Rhett Butler.
Rutherford
read letters from Olivia de Havilland, the wistful Melanie,
Selznick widow Jennifer Jones, and Rhonda Fleming, who was discovered
by the producer. "This giant among creators," de Havilland
wrote from Paris, "has enriched the lives of generation
after generation."
Rutherford
was asked if it was true that the actresses in "Gone with
the Wind" wore silk petticoats under their hoop skirts.
"Absolutely," she replied. "I told David he could
save a lot of money if he used flannel petticoats as I did in
westerns. He said maybe the audience wouldn't see the petticoats,
but the actresses would know they were silk."
Son of pioneer
filmmaker Lewis J. Selznick, David Selznick grew up in the movie
business and at 29 headed production at RKO studio when "King
Kong" was made and Katharine Hepburn became a star. He
moved to MGM, run by his father-in-law Louis B. Mayer, and produced
"David Copperfield," "Dinner at Eight,"
"Anna Karenina" and "A Tale of Two Cities."
Selznick
formed his own company, brought Alfred Hitchcock and Ingrid
Bergman to Hollywood, and made such films as "A Star Is
Born," "Rebecca," "Spellbound," "Duel
in the Sun" as well as "Gone with the Wind."
He died in 1965.
Jennifer
at the 75th Academy Awards!
It was very exciting
to see Jennifer, along with 58 previous Oscar winners,
in a special tribute at this year's Academy Awards ceremonies.
She looked wonderful! The tribute was in honor of the
Academy's 75th anniversary and was introduced by Olivia
de Havilland (looking fabulous herself at 86). |
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JJ's
first award?
Here's an interesting
bit of trivia - Bill Mayrath writes to me and sends this photo
of an award given to Phylis Isley by Pawnee Bill who had a Wild
Wild West Show that competed with and later merged with Buffalo
Bill. The award reads:
"On the 12th day of July,
1939, by authority of the Pawnee Indian Council and the Chiefs
of the Skidi Band of Pawnees - Phylis Isley was inducted into
the Pawnee Tribe for her distinguished accomplishments in the
entertainment world, reflecting great credit upon her native
state of Oklahoma and is hereby given the Indian name of "Red
Star".
Thank you Bill! And if anyone
would like a larger sized photo of the award (that you can actually
read), drop me an e-mail and I will forward it to you.
AFI Chooses Top
100 Romantic Films
"Love is a Many Splendored
Thing" was chosen as one of the Top 100 films (it ranked
#85). Hard to believe that "Portrait of Jennie" didn't
make it! (although it and "Love Letters" were among
the 400 films nominated). You can see AFI's complete list on
their web site
Jones
attends Peck wedding
(VARIETY, Sept. 17, 2001)
THEY FLEW IN FROM ALL OVER, but then were unable to wing out.
For the wedding of Cecilia Peck to Daniel Voll, guests arrived
from as far away as Bali and as near as Mexico for the Sept.
8 ceremony at the home of her parents Veronique and Gregory
Peck. Most of the guests were the close friends of the couple
but the showbiz contingent included Lauren Bacall and Jennifer
Jones Simon as well as the Pecks' poker-playing pals Barbara
Sinatra, Angie Dickinson, Felicia Lemmon and Pat and Larry Gelbart.
The ring bearer was the wedding couple's 2½-year-old son Harper
for the service performed by Rev. Jim Cavanaugh of St. Jerome's.
(Army Archerd)
Jones
to host Norton Simon Documentary event
Excerpted
from Variety, Nov. 28, 2000
Candice
Bergen, Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones Simon will host guests
at the world premiere of "The Art of Norton Simon," the 30-minute
docu directed by Davis Guggenheim, produced by Charles Guggenheim
at the inauguration of the newly renovated Norton Simon Museum
Theater. The galleries, recently renovated by Frank Gehry, will
be open to guests … (Army Archerd) |