From David Thomson's A Biographical Dictionary of Film, Third Edition, 1994:

Jennifer Jones (Phylis Isley),
b. Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1919

Of all actresses loved and promoted by producers (as opposed to directors), the case of Jennifer Jones is the most intriguing. For a fair argument can be made that David Selznick both made and nearly destroyed her career. She was an ardent young actress before she met Selznick, but it is hard now to be sure whether we would know her if his great wind had not picked her up like a leaf. He treated her like his dream; he may have driven her to neurotic illness, and worse. But Jones survived. Indeed, she has buried three husbands, all of them strong and demanding personalities.

Her father was in dusty show business in Oklahoma: he owned a few theaters and ran a touring show. As Phylis Isley, she appeared in two B movies at Republic, New Frontier (39, George Sherman) and Dick Tracy's G-Men (39, William Whitney). In the same year, she married the young actor Robert Walker; they had two sons together. But in 1941, she auditioned at Selznick's New York office for the role of Claudia (eventually taken by Dorothy McGuire), Selznick saw her, called her out to Hollywood, and put her in a one-act play by William Saroyan, Hello Out There, in a brief theatre festival at Santa Barbara.

He put her under contract; he ordered and paid for many lessons; he found her a new name; and an affair began. Yet at that time, Selznick had Vivien Leigh, Joan Fontaine, and Ingrid Bergman under contract as well. Compared with those women, Jones was novice, willing clay, obedient, adoring and an unknown. Selznick got her the lead role at Fox in The Song Of Bernadette (43, Henry King), for which she won the best actress Oscar. Her earnestness, her simplicity, and her wide, credulous eyes all worked for the young woman who sees visions. It was less acting that blessed casting -- Jones had been educated at a Catholic school.

As their affair came to threaten his marriage, and help end hers, Selznick cast Jones as the elder daughter in Since You Went Away (44, John Cromwell) and loaned her to Hal Wallis for Love Letters (45, William Dieterle), in which she is very good as an amnesiac.

Selznick and his wife broke up in the summer of 1945, and not long thereafter he and Jennifer Jones began to be seen as a couple. His control of her, even on loan-out work, was so suffocating and detailed, and so dependent on eternal memos, that he began to earn her a bad reuputaion. This was increased by her own uncommon shyness and insecurity. In the years that followed, there was great love, but terrible guilt and anxiety as well as confusion and suicide attempts by Jones. She was overwhelmed by Selznick's care, and probably grew more helpless as he made more strenuous efforts to look after her and to promote her as the greatest actress in the world. He controlled her career decisions, but began to lose his own momentum and judgment in the process.

She did Cluny Brown (46, Ernst Lubitsch) at Fox with great charm. But the major screen event of that time was her Pearl Chavez in Duel in the Sun (46, King Vidor), a lurid Western in which the strain of being a wanton half-breed and the notoriety of the sex scenes laid the groundwork for the film's camp reputation. She was not well cast, but she tried so hard as Pearl, and she was granted the very best inflamed mood that Technicolor could manage. Duel in the Sun is foolish, yet moving -- and it could not be so without the turmoil Selznick and Jones had made for themselves.

She had to play a child who becomes a woman in Portrait of Jennie (49, Dieterle), and she was loaned out for two duds -- We Were Strangers (49, John Huston) and Madame Bovary (49, Vincente Minnelli). She was at her peak, commercially; she had many offers; yet those two films were the best that plenty of indecision and personal chaos could manage. Most notably, there was a gap of nearly two years in which she was off the screen.

As she and Selznick were married, in 1949, she gave one of her best performances as the Shropshire lass torn between squire and parson in the Selznick-Korda Gone to Earth (50, Michael Powell). It was in 1951 that Robert Walker died, a disturbed man badly served by doctors, and a further spur to Jones's guilt.

She was at her best, seemingly inspired and supported by Olivier, in Carrie (52, William Wyler), and she did a kind of remake of Duel in the Sun -- Ruby Gentry (52, Vidor). She was funny, maybe without knowing why, in Beat the Devil (54, Huston) and helpless in Indiscretion of an American Wife (54, Vittorio De Sica). Selznick's dominance faltered, and it may not be coincidental that Love Is a Many Spledored Thing (55, King) proved her first box-office hit in years. She aged considerably in the feeble Good Morning, Miss Dove (55, Henry Koster), but she began to show her age in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (56, Nunnally Johnson), and she was a very vague Elizabeth Barrett Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (57, Sidney Franklin).

She was plainly too mature and sedate for the Selznick production of A Farewell to Arms (57, Charles Vidor), the making of which was a succession of problems. The film flopped and effectively closed Selznick's career as a producer. He insisted on casting her as Nicole -- much too young, far too disturbed -- in Tender Is the Night (62, King), a project that he prepared but could take no direct credit on.

When Selznick died, in 1965, she was left with much debt, their young daughter, a broken career, and the emotional wreckage that a great wind leaves behind. It did not all go well. Their daughter, Mary Jennifer, killed herself. Jones's career turned to The Idol (66, Daniel Petrie); Angel, Angel, Down We Go (69, Robert Thom); and The Towering Inferno (74, John Guillerman and Irwin Allen). But she married again -- to the millionaire art collector Norton Simon -- and she became not just his attendant in a paralyzing illness, but a surrogate in his business affairs.

Selznick's unquestioned adoration often meant that she was miscast: for her true range was narrow; her looks went quite early; and her own agonies, mixed with her husband's interference, lost her many good opportunities. But who else has survived such travails? Who knows how far she understood what was going on, or the effect she was having? She was an actress who caused a huge stir, on and off the screen. And she was such a creature of the 1940s, it seems odd in hindsight that her dark looks and her real experience as femme fatale and harassed woman never graced a film noir -- though Laura was one of the projects Selznick deemed unworthy of her.