Talk:Jennifer Jones

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Picky, perhaps....

"Death: Jones enjoyed a quiet retirement, living with her son Robert Walker, Jr. and his family in Malibu. . . "

Although she probably did enjoy her retirement, how do you know that she did? Without a citation, the best you can say is that perhaps she "lived in quiet retirement", or some such sentiment. Thank you, 24.47.173.120 (talk) 05:52, 20 January 2014 (UTC) During her quiet retirement she did not, however, live with her son, Robert Walker, Jr. He died in 1951. So it must have been with her second son Michael. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.111.142.139 (talk) 03:26, 2 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Affair with Selznick

The Selznick-Jones affair is actually not given sufficient attention in this article, as its impact on Walker, which is very well documented, is not mentioned. I will be adding text on that when I have a chance. But I just wanted to say that even the book "Star-Crossed," which is anything but sympathetic to Jones, says that there is no way of knowing if the affair took place before the separation from Walker. Unless we have better sourcing saying otherwise, I think that we have to be careful how we phrase this. Neither the Times or LATimes obits are quite that specific, and I don't think an offhand reference to the affair in s newspaper article is sufficient to counter what is in the book. However, there is no question the affair took place after they were separated and before the divorce. They're both dead, so there's no BLP issue, but we want to be precise. Coretheapple (talk) 14:06, 29 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Your wording [1] is fine. For the benefit of other readers, note that the NYT obit says, "But the marriage didn’t last; they separated in the fall of 1943, and by then Ms. Jones was deeply involved with Selznick." And an LAT article talks about how the publicity machine went to work to defuse adverse publicity after "The secret affair between the star and the Svengali 17 years her senior, desperately hidden from meddling gossips, had tanked Jones' marriage to actor-hunk Robert Walker and Selznick's to wife Irene, the saber-tongued daughter of MGM studio warlord Louis B. Mayer." (Coincidentally, Duel in the Sun is on TCM as I am writing this; Paul Green asserts that the film "cost Selznick his reputation as a producer of quality films and cast him as a typical Hollywood mogul lacking in good taste with the box-office dollar as his only motivation.") --Arxiloxos (talk) 17:05, 29 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Birth name: Phylis or Phyllis?

We want to be careful here to avoid Wikipedia mirrors.

Phylis (with one L)

Reliable sources

Less-reliable or unreliable sources

IMDB
Jennifer Jones tribute site (Possibly just one person's work, but well crafted and so possibly well curated.)
Alt Film Guide
And yadda yadda, a plethora of mostly blog-like sites, hard to know who's copying whom.

Phyllis (with two L's)

Reliable sources

Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History & Culture which is published by the Oklahoma Historical Society
Official Golden Globes page published by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association who run the Golden Globes.

Less-reliable or unreliable sources

FilmBug
Ancestry.com
And yadda yadda, a plethora of mostly blog-like sites, hard to know who's copying whom.

Disregarded

The Jennifer Project, a (well-crafted) blog which specifically says "According to Wikipedia...". Not a reliable source anyway.
TV.com has "Phylis" in the body text and "Phyllis" in a sidebar. Not a reliable source anyway.
A Facebook tribute page, ditto -- "Phylis" and "Phyllis" in different places. Not a reliable source anyway.

Conclusion

I dunno. It's basically the New York Times (and the LA Times and the Telegraph) against the Oklahoma Historical Society and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Most of the other stuff is probably people copying from each other rather than using primary sources. If anyone has any conclusive evidence that's be great. Absent that, I'm going to with "Phylis" with one L for now because:

I trust the NY Times more than any of the other sources listed. They are known to have actual fact-checkers and getting stuff like this right is exactly the kind of thing they are set up for. Ditto for the LA Times and the Telegraph.
"Phyllis" is much the more common spelling, and I can easily imagine someone (such as a copy editor) seeing "Phylis" as an an error and correcting it, while the converse would not occur. Herostratus (talk) 21:10, 21 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oh OK reading the article I see that she was billed as "Phyllis Isley" in her first two films (no ref for this is given though), which would be another cause for that being listed by sources as her actual name. (This doesn't mean that it wasn't her actual name of course.) Herostratus (talk) 21:17, 21 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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Portraying mixed-race characters

She was definitely convincing as the mulatto (half-Chinese)in the Love is a Many-Spendored Thing role and her phenotype appears to match the role. Is that why she was chosen? Being born in Oklahoma, isn't it a distinct possibility that she herself has mixed ancestry with one of the Indian tribes? This is a natural subject for her biography.Starhistory22 (talk) 23:53, 11 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

She was very much ethnically-ambiguous, though she was most definitely white. According to her biography by Peter Green, both of her parents were of German descent, so any suggestion that she had Native American ancestry (or anything else) in her bloodline would be purely speculative and unfounded (i.e. not to be included here). Her features obviously allowed her to get away with playing mixed-race characters during the era, but as far as anyone knows, this was purely aesthetic and not related to her actual biological ancestry. --Drown Soda (talk) 04:08, 22 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]