Jennifer Jones, an actress who won an Academy Award for playing a saint in “The Song of Bernadette” and became a popular sinner in Hollywood melodramas, including “Duel in the Sun” and “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing,” died Thursday at her home in Malibu, Calif. She was 90.

A spokeswoman for the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena, Calif., where Jones was trustee emeritus, confirmed the death but did not provide a cause. She was the widow of industrialist and renowned art collector Norton Simon.

By most accounts, Jones’ career faltered under the guidance of producer David O. Selznick, her second husband and one of the most powerful moguls in Hollywood. He tried to transform her into what film scholar David Thomson mockingly called “the greatest actress in the world,” while eliminating her quirky charms that first captivated audiences.

Few actresses have launched their careers with more fanfare than Jones, who received a huge publicity buildup for her first major film, “The Song of Bernadette” (1943). She played a 19th-century French peasant girl who sees visions of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes and defies Catholic Church authorities who claim she is a fraud.

Critic James Agee wrote in Time magazine that Jones offered “one of the most impressive screen debuts in years,” which showed her impact in an otherwise ponderous version of Franz Werfel’s novel. (Agee’s review overlooked her movie debut four years earlier under her real name, Phylis Isley, in a John Wayne western and a “Dick Tracy” serial.)

In her prime, Jones was among the screen’s great beauties, a striking brunette with a husky voice and ethereal stare. But there was also a sensitive, at times vulnerable, quality that broadened her appeal across genres.

After “The Song of Bernadette,” Jones played a charming home-front ingenue who faces wartime realities in “Since You Went Away” (1944) and a servant girl with a zest for plumbing in Ernst Lubitsch’s “Cluny Brown” (1946).

Among her 27 films, she is also remembered as the ghostly beauty who attracts painter Joseph Cotten in “Portrait of Jennie” (1948) and as a world-class swindler in John Huston’s “Beat the Devil” (1953), with Humphrey Bogart as a rival adventurer seeking uranium riches in Africa.

Most film scholars attribute her career decline to her long affair and then marriage in 1949 to producer Selznick, who cast her in turgid literary adaptations, including “Madame Bovary” (1949) as the title adulteress and “A Farewell to Arms” (1957) as a Red Cross nurse in love with soldier Rock Hudson.

In “Carrie” (1952), William Wyler’s version of Theodore Dreiser’s novel “Sister Carrie,” Jones held the screen well with Laurence Olivier playing her self-destructive lover. But Jones’ character, a crafty opportunist in the book, became a more sympathetic role onscreen that offended Dreiser purists.

Meanwhile, she lost important roles that Selznick deemed unworthy — including parts that made stars of Eva Marie Saint in “On the Waterfront” and Julie Harris in “East of Eden.” Selznick also alienated many directors with demanding memos and on-set fretting about lighting, costumes and script changes to benefit Jones.

Film scholar Jeanine Basinger, who specializes in the history of women in cinema, said, “One of the tragedies of Jennifer Jones’ career is that she will always be viewed through the filter of David O. Selznick.”

Phylis Lee Isley was born March 2, 1919, in Tulsa, Okla., where her parents started a tent show and then operated a movie theater chain. She began acting in a school run by Benedictine sisters and in 1937 enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.

At the dramatic school, she met Robert Walker, who would go on to thrive as a boyishly handsome leading man of 1940s films. They had two sons before divorcing in 1944.

Selznick put Jones under contract in 1941 and groomed her for “The Song of Bernadette.” Soon after, he and Jones, 17 years his junior, began an affair; at the time, he was married to Irene Mayer Selznick, the daughter of movie mogul Louis B. Mayer.