Gone to Earth

Jennifer Jones, the Oscar-winning actress who killed Robert Walker, has died at the age of 90. Jones scored an Oscar in her first major studio release in 1943 for The Song of Bernadette, the story of the French peasant girl who got plastered at Lourdes and whose nonsensical ramblings about visions created a sensation in 1858. This was the first of her Oscar-nominated performances in 4 straight years (a feat matched by only 4 other actors) – followed by a girl in love with an ill-fated World War II soldier in Since You Went Away, an amnesiac cured by Joseph Cotten’s love in Love Letters, and a half-breed tramp caught between brothers Gregory Peck and Cotton in the western Duel in the Sun, and one of 5 overall nominations with 1955’s turn as a Eurasian doctor who romances William Holden in Hong Kong in Love is a Many-Splendored Thing. Her personal life, however, would have garnered her own tabloid in the modern era. She divorced Walker, her first husband, an actor best remembered as the criss-crossing murderer in Strangers on a Train, contributing to his alcoholism and mental deterioration. During one emotional outburst, he was injected with sodium amytal in an attempt to calm him that resulted in an especially calming fatal allergic reaction. Even before the divorce, she had started an affair with mega-producer David O. Selznick, whose Svengaliesque approach to Jones’ career garnered all those nominations, but also contributed to her mental breakdown, which culminated in washing down a bottle of sleeping pills with a glass of red wine in a suicide attempt in 1967, 2 years after Selznick’s death. Things calmed down when she married industrialist Norman Simon and helped run his museum. She made a final screen appearance as the widowed painter who scam artist Fred Astaire tries to seduce and swindle before she plummets out of an elevator to her death in The Towering Inferno, a triumphant valedictory that scored her a Golden Globe nomination. The cheery coda on the A&E Biography episode was thwarted when her daughter with Selznick kept up the family tradition with a successful suicide in 1976.