American actress, a leggy, fresh faced brunette with warm natural beauty, probably best known for gracing many magazines covers and tantalized adolescent boys in 1971’s “Summer of ’42.” Along with 30 movies, she has also had eight husbands and nine marriages (she married one husband twice); nine miscarriages; one suicide attempt; electroshock therapy; a broken back from a riding accident; her daughter’s sexual abuse by her fifth husband; and an accidental shooting of herself in the hip.
Born in Brazil when her folks were there visiting her granddad, Jennifer and brother Michael were raised in New Rochelle, N Y and Wilton, CT by her father, a successful medical-supply business owner, and a home-maker mother. When she was 14, the family moved to New York City. On Easter Sunday, 1962, O’Neill swallowed sleeping pills because the move would separate her from her dog Mandy and horse Monty — “her whole world,” she said. 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” magazine and earning $80,000 a year. She hit the top of her field within a year or two with magazine covers and commercial ads.
An excellent rider, she won scores of horse show competitions in her teens. Jennifer 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 and giving her a long period of recovery.
At 17, she met an ex-marine Deed, the first of eight husbands, who fathered Aimee (1967?). Though struggling with depression, O’Neill started making movies, and in 1970, starred opposite John Wayne in “Rio Lobo.” A year later she separated from Deed, and got her big screen break in “Summer of ’42.” She went on to make 30 more films and marry six more husbands.
O’Neill declines to give her husbands’ last names. One of her most problematic marriages was with a man named John, with whom she had a son, Reis , c.1981. She turned her career over to him, only to find that he lost her nest egg and was sexually molesting her daughter.
O’Neill started a new line of skin-care products, does public speaking, performs in live theater and is part of a singing group. She wrote a film treatment, “Summer of ’62,” as a proposed sequel to the movie that made her famous, and expects to play herself in a TV movie of her autobiography, “Surviving Myself.” She is a born-again Christian, avid horseback rider, cook, painter and furniture designer.
Besides her daughter, Aimee, and son, Reis, she has another son, Cooper (born c. 1987). She lives now outside of Nashville, Tenn., with current husband, music club owner Mervin Louque whom she married in 1996.
She is the author of an autobiography ” Surviving Myself.”
Link to Wikipedia biography