What 1943 film starring Jennifer Jones is based on the life of a French saint?

The 1943 film starring Jennifer Jones about a French saint is The Song of Bernadette. Directed by Henry King for 20th Century Fox, it dramatizes the life of Bernadette Soubirous, a young woman from Lourdes.

The film centers on Bernadette’s reported visions of the Virgin Mary in 1858. Her claims initially attract suspicion from authorities and members of her community, but the events eventually lead to Lourdes becoming one of the world’s most important Catholic pilgrimage sites. Jennifer Jones’s performance brought her the Academy Award for Best Actress.

The screenplay was based on Franz Werfel’s 1941 novel, which became a major bestseller. Werfel, a Jewish writer who had fled Europe, reportedly made a vow to write about Bernadette after finding refuge in Lourdes during the Second World War. The film presents the story as a devotional historical drama rather than a documentary reconstruction.

A frequent mix-up is Joan of Arc, another famous French religious figure portrayed in many films. Bernadette Soubirous was not a medieval warrior; she was a nineteenth-century visionary who was canonized as a saint in 1933.