In his memoir, “An Open Book,” the late film director John Huston remembered the actress Jennifer Jones thusly: “Jennifer looked for direction in every move she made. She put herself completely in the hands of the director, more than any other actress I’ve ever worked with. And she was not an automaton. Jennifer took what you gave her and made it distinctly her own.”

Beginning Friday, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s weeklong, 13-film retrospective showcases the work of Ms. Jones, now 89 and retired from the screen since 1974, in collaboration with a who’s who of mid-20th-century directors. In films by Huston, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, King Vidor, Vincente Minnelli, Ernst Lubitsch, William Wyler, Henry King, and others, Ms. Jones was never less than enchanting.

Blessed with limpid eyes, high cheekbones, and lips that purse devoutly in prayer in her Oscar-winning interpretation of St. Bernadette Soubirous in “The Song of Bernadette” (1943), or splay into a licentious, leering overbite in Vidor’s infamous, overheated “Duel in the Sun” (1946), Ms. Jones was a bona fide movie star with the looks to prove it. But the lingering, haunting, ephemeral truth she brought to the movies came from deeper within.

“She was one of those actresses who would really show whatever they were feeling in their facial expressions,” Vidor, helmer of “Duel in the Sun” and “Ruby Gentry,” once said of the actress’s process. “If you can make them feel something inside, it will photograph on-screen. Whatever gentleness and patience the director expended on Jennifer Jones, he was rewarded a hundred-fold with a sensitive and intriguing performance.”

Ms. Jones’s stepson, the producer Daniel Selznick, agreed. “Jennifer always had that transparency,” he said recently in a phone interview. “In life or on-screen, you knew if something was troubling her. She admitted to me that she wasn’t good at hiding her emotions when she wanted to hide them. Only certain actresses have that.”

The other attribute the actress demonstrated during a career that began in earnest with “The Song of Bernadette,” in which she was billed for the first time as Jennifer Jones, was a unique gift for liminal characters. Whether she was stretched between social classes, as in “Madame Bovary” and Lubitsch’s “Cluny Brown”; cultures, as in King’s “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing”; loyalty and lust, as in “Duel in the Sun” and “Gone to Earth,” or reality and belief, as in William Dieterle’s sublime “Portrait of Jennie” and “Bernadette,” a Jennifer Jones heroine was always spanning two worlds.

“That’s her unspoken strength,” Mr. Selznick said. “It’s why showing a body of her work is so valuable.”

It’s a tribute to how solidly Hollywood gossip ossifies into film legend that Ms. Jones’s unique gifts are rarely espoused outside her relationship with Mr. Selznick’s father, the iconic producer David O. Selznick. Though Ms. Jones had already starred in two features for Poverty Row Republic Studios under her birth name, Phylis Isley, and appeared in a pioneering 1939 television broadcast of the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault’s “The Streets of New York,” it was David O. Selznick who “discovered” and “introduced” the rechristened actress to movie audiences and the Academy via “The Song of Bernadette.” And, though both were married at the time (the 25-year-old Ms. Jones to actor Robert Walker; Selznick to Louis B. Mayer’s daughter, the future Broadway producer Irene Mayer Selznick), their relationship grew into one of the most famous backstage romances in Hollywood history.

Selznick, who had cemented his place in Tinseltown with his company’s production, in 1939, of “Gone With the Wind,” personally produced four of Ms. Jones’s feature films: John Cromwell’s sterling World War II home front melodrama “Since You Went Away” (1944), “Duel in the Sun,” 1950’s “Gone to Earth” (which will be screened in its restored original version, which existed before Selznick’s scissors and reshoots transformed Powell and Pressburger’s vision into the retitled “The Wild Heart”), and “Portrait of Jennie” (1948). In each, Selznick’s unified obsessions with Ms. Jones and with filmmaking resulted in torrents of notes and memos advising his crews on how best to showcase his eventual second wife’s talents.

“Duel in the Sun,” a picture so ablaze in libidinous hues that set visitor Michael Powell speculated one sunset sequence alone “must have emptied the Technicolor dye vats for several months,” proved the apotheosis of Selznick’s genius for wheedling. Vidor, a craftsman renowned for his onset largesse and unflappable professionalism, wound up so rattled by the experience of mediating among Ms. Jones, Selznick, and the rest of the company that his diary describes recurring nightmares during shooting in which Selznick took over the director’s chair and electrical cables turned into snakes and strangled the crew.

Ms. Jones’s non-Selznick production collaborators were not spared her champion’s opinion, either. “I gather now that everyone that worked with Jennifer on a non-David Selznick film learned that one of the prices to pay was a level of, not interference, but genuine involvement and a desire to enhance the project in any way my father could,” Mr. Selznick said tactfully.

Indeed, the biographies and memoirs of her storied directors all contain at least one reference to how best to cope with Ms. Jones’s producer-husband’s never-ending, mostly unsolicited, often highly sarcastic contouring missives. “Apparently,” went one note Selznick wrote to Vincente Minnelli regarding a “Madame Bovary” makeup test, “whoever made her up was under the impression that Emma Bovary was Javanese.”

Mr. Selznick takes a breakfast-table view of his namesake’s micromanagement. “I know from having had him as a father that he overdid it in terms of giving out his advice and counsel,” Mr. Selznick said. “He knew that people either resented it or didn’t welcome it.”

Selznick’s intransigence eventually led to his ousting from a long-gestating 1962 dream project adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night,” starring Ms. Jones. A fatal heart attack in 1965 ended his stewardship of his wife’s career. But the producer’s son and actress’s stepson, who will be on hand at to introduce several of the films in the Lincoln Center series, remains kindly disposed to his father’s meddlesome ways and obsessive fascination with Jennifer Jones on-screen and off.

“It was kind of sweet and, in its own way, kind of innocent, almost,” he said. “And it was terribly, terribly well-intentioned.”

Through May 24 (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, at Broadway at West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).