Jennifer O’Neill (born February 20, 1948) is an American actress, model, author and speaker, known for her role in the 1971 film Summer of ’42 and as a face of CoverGirl cosmetics starting in the 1970s.
O’Neill was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the granddaughter of a Brazilian bank president, and the daughter of a famous Brazilian medical and dental supply import/export businessman, Oscar D’ O’Neill, of Irish and Spanish descent, and his English wife, Irene (“Rene”) Freda, a homemaker. O’Neill and her older brother Michael were raised in New Rochelle, New York, and Wilton, Connecticut.
When she was 14, the family moved to New York City. On Easter Sunday, 1962, O’Neill attempted suicide because the move would separate her from her dog Mandy and horse Monty — “her whole world”.That same year, she was discovered by the Ford modeling agency and put under contract. By age 15, she was gracing the cover of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen and other magazines, earning $80,000… read more
Jennifer O’Neill (born February 20, 1948) is an American actress, model, author and speaker, known for her role in the 1971 film Summer of ’42 and as a face of CoverGirl cosmetics starting in the 1970s.
O’Neill was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the granddaughter of a Brazilian bank president, and the daughter of a famous Brazilian medical and dental supply import/export businessman, Oscar D’ O’Neill, of Irish and Spanish descent, and his English wife, Irene (“Rene”) Freda, a homemaker. O’Neill and her older brother Michael were raised in New Rochelle, New York, and Wilton, Connecticut.
When she was 14, the family moved to New York City. On Easter Sunday, 1962, O’Neill attempted suicide because the move would separate her from her dog Mandy and horse Monty — “her whole world”.That same year, she was discovered by the Ford modeling agency and put under contract. By age 15, she was gracing the cover of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen and other magazines, earning $80,000 a year in 1962 working as a fashion model in New York City and also working in Paris, France, and dating older men.
An accomplished rider, O’Neill won upwards of 200 ribbons at horse show competitions in her teens. She saved up her modeling fees and bought a horse, Alezon, who balked before a wall at a horse show, breaking O’Neill’s neck and back in three places, and giving her a long period of recovery. She attended New York City’s Professional Children’s School and the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan. Later, she moved on to films and worked in a number of television movies and series.
In 1968 O’Neill landed a small role in For Love of Ivy. In 1970 she played one of the lead female roles in Rio Lobo starring opposite John Wayne.
She is most remembered for her role in the 1971 film Summer of ’42, where she played Dorothy Walker, the young widow of a pilot shot down and killed in World War II. Her agent allegedly had to fight to even get a reading for the part, since the role had been cast for an “older woman” to a “coming of age” 15 year old boy, and the director was only considering actresses over the age of thirty, Barbra Streisand being at the top of the list.
O’Neill continued acting for the next two decades. She appeared in The Carey Treatment (1972), Lady Ice (1973), The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975), Caravans (1978), A Force of One (1979), Scanners (1981), and The Cover Girl Murders (1993 made-for-television film). She went to Europe in 1976 and worked with Italian director Luchino Visconti, appearing in his last film L’innocente (1976), where she played the part of the mistress, Teresa Raffo.
In 1982, O’Neill starred in the short-lived NBC prime time soap opera Bare Essence. Her credits include singing in the Chrysler Corporation commercial “Change in Charger” that represented the end of the Dodge Charger in 1975. In 1984, she played the lead female role on the CBS television series Cover Up; the lead male actor, Jon-Erik Hexum, was accidentally killed on the studio set after placing a blank-loaded prop gun to his temple and pulling the trigger—the wadding from the blank cartridge drove a bone fragment from Hexum’s skull into his brain.
O’Neill is also listed in the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of American History’s Center for Advertising History for her long standing contract with Cover Girl cosmetics as its model and spokesperson in ads and television commercials.
O’Neill has been married nine times to eight husbands (she married, divorced, and remarried husband number six); at one point, she was married to four different men in four years. At age 44, she married husband number seven sooner than any other actress, sooner than Zsa Zsa Gabor (who was 63), Liza Minnelli (59) and Lana Turner (49), making her the youngest “most married” Hollywood celebrity. The August 23, 1993, issue of People magazine reports that a friend of O’Neill’s says that the actress obtained the (Texas) annulment of marriage number seven (Neil L. Bonin – after less than five months) “… because she felt stifled.”
O’Neill has three children from as many fathers, a daughter (Aimee) by her first husband whom she married at age 17, and a son (Reis Michael) from her fifth marriage and another son (Cooper Alan) from her sixth marriage.
At age 34, O’Neill suffered a gunshot wound. Police officers in the Westchester County town of Bedford, New York, who interviewed the actress, said that on October 23, 1982, she shot herself accidentally in the abdomen with a .38 caliber revolver at her Bedford mansion while she was trying to determine if it was loaded.
She describes many of her life experiences, including her marriages and career, to her move to her Tennessee farm in the late 1990s in her 1999 autobiography Surviving Myself. O’Neill says that she wrote this autobiography (her first book) “… at the prompting of her children.”
In 2004, O’Neill wrote and published From Fallen To Forgiven, a book of biographical notes and philosophical thoughts about life and existence. The actress, who had an abortion after the divorce from her first husband while dating a Wall Street socialite, became a pro-life activist and a born-again Christian in 1986 at age 38, counseling abstinence to teens. Concerning her abortion, she writes:
I was told a lie from the pit of hell: that my baby was just a blob of tissue. The aftermath of abortion can be equally deadly for both mother and unborn child. A woman who has an abortion is sentenced to bear that for the rest of her life.
O’Neill continues to be active as a writer, inspirational speaker, fundraiser for the benefit of crisis pregnancy centers across the United States. She has also served as the spokesperson for the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, a non-denominational, non-political, non-profit organization dedicated to post-abortion healing and recovery.
O’Neill works for several other charitable causes as well, such as Retinitis Pigmentosa International and the Arthritis Foundation. As a breast cancer survivor she has also been a former spokesperson for the American Cancer Society. She has also hosted a one hour television special for World Vision shot in Africa concerning the HIV epidemic. In addition, she remains actively involved with her childhood love of animals and horses, sponsoring the Jennifer O’Neill Tennis Tournament to benefit the ASPCA, and fund-raiser for Guiding Eyes for the blind.
O’Neill purchased a horse farm in Tennessee called Hillenglade Farm where she runs a non-profit organization as a ministry and retreat for girls and young women. —Wikipedia
