JOAN BENNETT AMERICAN ACTRESS BORN
1910 FEBRUARY 27 -1990 DECEMBER 7
Born February 27, 1910 in Palisades, New Jersey, USA
Died December 7, 1990 in Scarsdale, New York, USA (heart attack)
Birth Name Joan Geraldine Bennett
Nickname Joanie
Height 5' 3½" (1.61 m)
Mini Bio (2)
Joan Geraldine Bennett was born on February 27, 1910, in Palisades, New Jersey. Her parents were both successful stage actors, especially her father, Richard Bennett, and often toured the country for weeks at a time. In fact, Joan came from a long line of actors, dating back to the 18th century. Often, when her parents were on tour, Joan and her two older sisters, Constance Bennett, who later became an actress, and Barbara were left in the care of close friends. At the age of four, Joan made her first stage appearance. She debuted in films a year later in The Valley of Decision (1916), in which her father was the star and the entire Bennett clan participated. In 1923 she again appeared in a film which starred her father, playing a pageboy in The Eternal City (1923). It would be five more years before Joan appeared again on the screen. In between, she married Jack Marion Fox, who was 26 compared to her young age of 16. The union was anything but happy, in great part because of Fox's heavy drinking. In February of 1928 Joan and Jack had a baby girl they named Adrienne. The new arrival did little to help the marriage, though, and in the summer of 1928 they divorced. Now with a baby to support, Joan did something she had no intention of doing--she turned to acting. She appeared in Power (1928) with Alan Hale and Carole Lombard, a small role but a start. The next year she starred in Bulldog Drummond (1929), sharing top billing with Ronald Colman. Before the year was out she was in three more films--Disraeli (1929), The Mississippi Gambler (1929) and Three Live Ghosts (1929). Not only did audiences like her, but so did the critics. Between 1930 and 1931, Joan appeared in nine more movies. In 1932 she starred opposite Spencer Tracy in She Wanted a Millionaire (1932), but it wasn't one she liked to remember, partly because Tracy couldn't stand the fact that everyone was paying more attention to her than to him. Joan was to remain busy and popular throughout the rest of the 1930s and into the 1940s. By the 1950s Joan was well into her 40s and began to lessen her film appearances. She made only eight pictures, in addition to appearing in two television series. After Desire in the Dust (1960), Joan would be absent from the movie scene for the next ten years, resurfacing in House of Dark Shadows (1970), reprising her role from the Dark Shadows: The Vampire Curse (1966) TV series as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard. Joan's final screen appearance was in the Italian thriller Suspiria (1977). Her final public performance was in the TV movie Divorce Wars: A Love Story (1982). On December 7, 1990, Joan died of a heart attack in Scarsdale, New York. She was 80 years old.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Denny Jackson
Eighteen-year-old Joan Bennett had intended to avoid the Bennett tradition of acting but, divorced and with a child to support, had little choice; she accepted a role in her father's play "Jarnegan", then her first leading film role in Bulldog Drummond (1929). Her popularity growing, she made 14 films under a Fox contract, mostly as vapid blonde ingénues; the best of these, Me and My Gal (1932), as a wisecracking waitress. Leaving Fox to appear in Little Women (1933), she then signed a personal contract with independent producer Walter Wanger, who managed her career from then on. When Wanger and director Tay Garnett made her a brunette for Trade Winds (1938), the seemingly trivial change drastically altered her screen image from insipid ingénue to smoldering temptress. Dark-haired for the rest of her career, she made her finest films in the 1940s with director Fritz Lang: Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945), becoming the queen of film-noir femme fatales. In December 1951, Wanger (by then her husband of 11 years) shot her agent in a jealous rage; the resulting scandal virtually ended Joan's film career. Aside from TV-movies, she made six more theatrical films. From 1950 through the1970s she worked steadily in theatre and TV, starring for five years in Dark Shadows: The Vampire Curse (1966). A 1967 interviewer found her happy and contented. She last appeared in a 1986 TV documentary on Spencer Tracy.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Rod Crawford < puffinus@u.washington.edu>
Family (4)
Spouse David Wilde (14 February 1978 - 7 December 1990) (her death)
Walter Wanger (12 January 1940 - 20 September 1965) (divorced) (2 children)
Gene Markey (12 March 1932 - 3 June 1937) (divorced) (1 child)
John Marion Fox (15 September 1926 - 30 July 1928) (divorced) (1 child)
Children Melinda Markey
Parents Richard Bennett
Adrienne Morrison
Relatives Barbara Bennett (sibling)
Constance Bennett (sibling)
Trade Mark (1)
Often played untrustworthy but sexy femme fatales
Trivia (34)
Was pregnant with daughter Melinda Markey while filming Little Women (1933).
Daughter of actors Richard Bennett and Adrienne Morrison
Younger sister of actresses Barbara Bennett and Constance Bennett.
Filming on She Wanted a Millionaire (1932) was interrupted for 6 months when Joan broke her leg in a fall from a horse.
She was nearsighted and wore glasses when not on public view.
Joan's hobbies: Interior decorating, gardening/horticulture, dog breeding, collecting miniature (model) horses.
Daughters: Adrienne Ralston Fox (became Diana Markey) born 20 February 1928; Melinda Markey born 27 February 1934; Stephanie Wanger, born 26 June 1943; Shelley Wanger, born 4 July 1948.
Her 78 feature-length films include three bit parts in silents and 6 TV-movies.
At the time of her death, Joan had 13 grandchildren. Her first two great-grandchildren were on the way - one of her grandsons and his wife were expecting twins.
She was one of only three cast members who appeared on Dark Shadows: The Vampire Curse (1966) from the beginning to the end. She appeared on the first episode, June 27, 1966, as well as its last, April 2, 1971.
She made five films for Fritz Lang, more than any other American actor or actress who worked with him (many actors disliked working with Lang).
Was offered the role of Beth McCarthy in Cocoon (1985). Director Ron Howard wanted to reunite co-star Don Ameche with one of his former leading ladies and he thought of Joan. Unfortunately, she was in frail health at the time and supposedly turned down the role, a decision she later regretted when "Cocoon" became one of the biggest box office hits of 1985 and spawned a sequel. The part was played by Gwen Verdon. Miss Bennett did not, in fact, turn down the role. Rather, she was talked out of taking it by her fourth husband, David Wilde. Wilde insisted that the film too closely resembled the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). He also felt that it was beneath Miss Bennett's dignity to be working under "Opie Taylor" or "Richie Cunningham".
Her first grandchild, Amanda Anderson, was born in March, 1949 to daughter Diana.
Played Amy March in Little Women (1933) with Katharine Hepburn. She played Elizabeth Taylor's mother in Father of the Bride (1950). Taylor played Amy March in the remake: Little Women (1949).
Appeared in Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971), although only in archive footage. The film that the characters in the movie go to see is Father of the Bride (1950), and a clip is show featuring Joan.
Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume Two, 1986-1990, pages 82-84. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999.
In Italy, most of her films were dubbed by Lydia Simoneschi, including Father of the Bride (1950) and its sequel Father's Little Dividend (1951). She was occasionally dubbed by Lia Orlandini, Renata Marini and Tina Lattanzi.
Finalist for the part of Scarlett O'Hara in the classic Gone with the Wind (1939). Vivien Leigh got the role at the last minute. However, the film's producer, David O. Selznick offered to cast her oldest daughter, Diana in the role of Bonnie Blue Butler, Rhett and Scarlett's daughter as a sort of consolation prize. Miss Bennett refused the offer. In reality, Diana, who was 11 years old at the time of the film's premiere, was way too old for the role - the part called for a toddler.
Her grandfather, Morris W. Morris (an actor known as Lewis Morrison on stage), was of English and well-off Spanish ancestry. Joan Bennett spoke of this, in detail, in her 1970 autobiography "The Bennett Playbill". Morris had also served as a lieutenant during the Civil War.
Granddaughter of Rose Wood and the stage actor Lewis Morrison, birth name: Morris W. Morris (1845 - 1906).
Aunt of Gyl Roland, Lorinda Roland and Morton Downey Jr..
Was called "Doanie" by her grandchildren because, allegedly, one of her granddaughters could not say "Joanie" when she was younger.
At age 39, Bennett became Tinseltown's youngest and sexiest grandmother when her daughter gave birth. Marlene Dietrich, the former title holder, sent Bennett a telegram thanking her for taking the "heat off her".
Dians Productions, Bennett's production company, was named after her daughter Adrienne (a.k.a, Diana.).
Husband Walter Wanger shot Bennett's agent, Jennings Lang, in the groin in 1951 because he discovered they were having an affair and caught them in the act in Lang's car. Wanger was convicted of attempted murder and served a four-month sentence.
Ex-mother-in-law of Don Hayden.
She was a popular target of disdain in Hedda Hopper's gossip column. To get her point across Bennett mailed Hopper a skunk as a Valentines Day gift in 1950 with a note that read, "You Stink!".
She was a very active member of both the Hollywood Democratic Committee and The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and donated her time and money to many liberal causes (such as the Civil Rights Movement) and political candidates (including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter) during her lifetime.
Acting mentor and friend of David Selby.
From 1961 to 1964, Joan was romantically involved with Actor John Emery, and cared for him to the end of his final illness.
In her 1970 memoir, THE BENNETT PLAYBILL, Joan Bennett said that she found "the accent on trivia" in the press about the lives of celebrities never ceased to amaze her. In that same paragraph, she listed many of the pieces of personal trivia about herself that were reported in the press (and were true): she loved peanut butter, knocked on wood for luck, made a great hollandaise sauce, loved fresh flowers, hated turnips, slept in a nightgown, and favored "shocking pink and green." She was concerned that the focus on such minutiae overshadowed what she called "the current long-hair four-letter revolution" and the increasing presence of pornography in American culture.
Appeared in three Oscar Best Picture nominees Disraeli (1929), Little Women (1933) and Father of the Bride (1950) in three different decades.
Off all the famous actresses, Joan Bennett was the youngest grandmother at the age of 39.
Co-starred with Edward G. Robinson in The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945).
Personal Quotes (17)
I don't think much of most of the films I made, but being a movie star was something I liked very much.
[about the attention she was getting as a cast member of the cult series Dark Shadows: The Vampire Curse (1966)] I feel positively like a Beatle.
My film career faded. A man can go on playing certain roles 'til he's sixty. But not a woman.
[in 1984] The "Golden Age" is gone, and with it most of the people of great taste. It doesn't seem to be any fun any more.
[on Hollywood attorney Jerry Giesler] Whenever trouble arose in Hollywood, the first cry for legal help was, "Get Giesler!".
Meryl Streep can act Polish or English or Australian but she sure as hell can't act blonde.
[on femme fatales] Let people hiss. They'll still be sore at the bad woman long after they've forgotten the nice girl who got the man.
[on femme fatales] Few people remember good women. They don't forget bad girls.
[1946] There are hundreds of glamor girls in Hollywood, but actresses who are willing to let down their hair, are always in demand. Getting a salty role is like finding an old friend. One feels the significance of the character.
[1970] To me, Fritz Lang remains one of the great directors in the history of the business, and working with him was a fascinating exercise in the art of making motion pictures. On occasion, whenever he makes a trip to New York from his home in California, we still get together for a delightful evening of do-you-remember-when, and the-trouble-with-you-was.
[1970] Now that I stop to think of it, there are only a scant half-dozen of my own total of seventy films that were acceptable to me and they include Little Women (1933), Private Worlds (1935), Trade Winds (1938), Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944), and Scarlet Street (1945).
[on sister Constance Bennett] Of her fifty-five films, there were only five she considered worthy and she made no pretenses otherwise: Common Clay (1930), The Common Law (1931), What Price Hollywood? (1932), Our Betters (1933), and Topper (1937).
Had it not been for my new darker image, I'd never have been considered for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939).
Nineteen-thirty-nine was also a time of complete transition for my career. That was the year my hair turned prematurely brown. I was scheduled to do another film produced by Walter [Walter Wanger] and directed by Tay Garnett. Tay, who had just viewed Walter's film Algiers (1938), with Hedy Lamarr and Charles Boyer, insisted that Hedy was a brunette edition of me, and he and Walter thought it would be a great joke if they put me in a dark wig for Trade Winds (1938).
[on her change of appearance from blonde to brunette] No one anticipated the reaction, least of all me, but the resulting publicity went wild. An avalanche of mail poured into the studio; later, one of the national magazines did a cover story on the three lookalikes: Hedy, Vivien Leigh and me. A national hairdresser's association expressed its wholehearted approval and predicted a new trend of brunette-ism would sweep the country. Always the comments noted the striking resemblance between Hedy Lamarr and me. I could never see it myself. To me I just looked like Joan Bennett with dark hair, but there must have been something to it because often after Trade Winds (1938) was released, in dimly lit restaurants I was greeted as Miss Lamarr. Personally, I liked the idea of escaping from all that bland, blonde innocence and thought the whole thing was very funny, but I don't think Hedy found the comparisons very amusing.
For ten years, with the exception of Little Women (1933) and Private Worlds (1935), I'd played the insipid blonde ingenue, short on brains, long on bank accounts, the victim in a love triangle, and, for some reason that now escapes me, I was often English. Suddenly, I found myself filming Trade Winds (1938) in a dark wig, and with eyes at half-mast and voice lowered an octave, I positively smoldered all over the South Seas.
[on her sister, Constance Bennett] That beautiful sister of mine was an overwhelming and volatile mixture. One had the feeling that she'd been shot from a canon and showered her sparks over an incredulous world with no thought or care where they fell, a carbon copy of Father (Richard Bennett). She was like some silvery comet who streaked through life with daring speed, the wellspring of which was an inner confidence that I deeply admired. At times, particularly in childhood, I was intimidated by her but she dictated from an aura of affection for me that was never threatening.
I'm aware of the priceless privilege of having been born into the theater. Although it was a career I rejected at first, the profession has given me an incredibly varied life and more than my fair share of success, failure, love, laughter, and despair. I've not a single regret for any of it.
