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Oscar-Winner Jennifer Jones is Dead at 90

Actress Jennifer Jones, who won an Oscar for her performance in the 1943 film The Song of Bernadette, has died at age 90.

Reports the LA Times:

Jones died of natural causes at her home in Malibu, according to Leslie C. Denk, a spokeswoman for the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena.

Jones oversaw the museum following Simon’s death in 1993, but she was best known for her movie career.

Audiences in the 1940s and 1950s knew Jones well for what might today be called “steamy” performances with stars like Greg Peck and William Holden in tragedies and epics like Duel in the Sun and Love is a Many Splendored Thing. A handsome brunette, Jones looked at first glance like the girl next door but had plenty of oomph and sophistication. (She’s terrific as a not-so-innocent British wife, playing against Humphrey Bogart, in Beat the Devil.)  Her affair with super-producer David O. Selznick was fodder for the gossip magazines.

Still, she WAS an innocent in her Oscar-winning role as Bernadette Soubirous, the young woman who has a vision of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes. She was also Oscar-nominated for the films Since You Went Away (1944), Love Letters (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946) and Love is a Many Splendored Thing (1955).

See photos of Jennifer Jones >>

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