Joan Geraldine Bennett (February 27, 1910 – December 7, 1990) was an American stage, film, and television actress, one of three acting sisters from a show-business family. Beginning her career on the stage, Bennett appeared in more than 70 films from the era of silent films, well into the sound era. She is best remembered for her film noir femme fatale roles in director Fritz Lang's films—including Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944), and Scarlet Street (1945)—and for her television role as matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (and ancestors Naomi Collins, Judith Collins Trask, and Flora Collins in various timelines) in the gothic 1960s soap opera Dark Shadows, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Daytime Programming at the 20th Primetime Emmy Awards in 1968.
Bennett's career had three distinct phases: first as a winsome blonde ingenue, then as a sensuous brunette femme fatale (with looks that movie magazines often compared to those of Hedy Lamarr), and finally as a warmhearted wife-and-mother figure.
In 1951, Bennett's screen career was marred by scandal after her third husband, film producer Walter Wanger, shot and injured her agent Jennings Lang. Wanger suspected that she and Lang were having an affair,Erickson, Hal. Joan Bennett: Biography AllMovie. a charge which she adamantly denied. She married four times.
For her final film role, as Madame Blanc in Dario Argento's cult horror film Suspiria (1977), she was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress at the 5th Saturn Awards.
Early life and family
Joan Geraldine Bennett was born in the Palisade section of Fort Lee, New Jersey, on February 27, 1910, the youngest of three daughters of actor Richard Bennett and actress and literary agent Adrienne Morrison. Joan's parents had expected her to be a boy and had agreed on the name John, after her father's character John Shand in his hit play What Every Woman Knows with actress Maude Adams. She later said, "I guess I was forgiven for emerging as a female since father declared later I was 'a rosebud blooming in the sun and it was love at first sight.' As for my name, Maude Adams's Scottish-accented pronunciation of 'John' was very close to 'Joan' and the matter was settled in that way." She was given the middle name Geraldine after the Bennetts' lawyer, Gerald Stalter.
Her elder sisters were actress Constance Bennett, who was the mother of sculptor Lorinda Roland, and actress and dancer Barbara Bennett, who was the first wife of singer Morton Downey and the mother of Morton Downey Jr..
Bennett's father was the first member of his family to become a professional actor. Her paternal ancestors, the Bennetts, were sawmill operators. According to Joan, her great-great-grandfather Moses Bennett started the family tradition of becoming a preacher: "He became one of the class of unordained, lay preachers known as community circuit riders, who traveled the surrounding country on horseback and, without fee, preached for the glory of God and the salvation of men." She believed acting came naturally to her father because "the Bennetts were powerful speakers and given to histrionics in the pulpit", noting that "a good preacher also had to be a good actor."
On her mother's side, Bennett was the fifth generation of a family of actors. The first actor in her family was her great-great-grandfather William Wodin (b. 1770), a Welshman who moved to London, changed his surname to Wood, and became a strolling player. His son, William F. Wood (b. 1799), Bennett's great-grandfather, specialized in pantomime. The younger William married a Scottish dancer named Sarah Campbell, a descendant of the Duke of Argyll. William, Sarah, and their two sons relocated to New York in 1838. Their daughter, Rosabel "Rose" Wood (b. 1845), Bennett's maternal grandmother, became an actress and dancer. In 1865, Rose married Jamaica-born actor Lewis Morrison, Bennett's maternal grandfather, the son of an English planter and a woman of Spanish descent. The Morrisons acted in Shakespearean plays, Restoration comedies, and popular dramas of the time.
Bennett first appeared in a silent film as a child with her parents, sisters, and aunt Blanche in her father's drama The Valley of Decision (1916), which he adapted and directed for the screen. It was filmed in Santa Barbara, California, and she and her sisters portrayed "unborn souls" in the film's prelude. She attended Miss Hopkins School for Girls in Manhattan, then St. Margaret's, a boarding school in Waterbury, Connecticut, and L'Hermitage, a finishing school in Versailles, France.
Career Blonde roles
Bennett's stage debut was at age 18, acting with her father in Jarnegan (1928), which ran on Broadway for 136 performances and for which she received good reviews. By the time she turned 20 she had become a movie star through such roles as Phyllis Benton in Bulldog Drummond starring Ronald Colman, which was her first important role, and Lady Clarissa Pevensey opposite George Arliss in Disraeli (both 1929).
She moved quickly from movie to movie throughout the 1930s. Bennett appeared as a blonde (her natural hair color) for several years. She starred in the role of Dolores Fenton in the United Artists musical Puttin' On The Ritz (1930) opposite Harry Richman and as Faith Mapple, Captain Ahab Ceely's beloved, opposite John Barrymore in an early sound version of Moby Dick (1930) at Warner Brothers.
Under contract to Fox Film Corporation, she appeared in several movies. She played the role of Jane Miller opposite Spencer Tracy in She Wanted a Millionaire (1932), receiving top billing. She was billed second, after Tracy, for her role as Helen Riley, a personable waitress who trades wisecracks, in Me and My Gal (1932).
Bennett left Fox to play Amy March, a pert sister competing with Katharine Hepburn's Jo in Little Women (1933), which was directed by George Cukor for RKO. This movie brought Bennett to the attention of independent film producer Walter Wanger, who signed her to a contract and began managing her career. She played the role of Sally MacGregor, a psychiatrist's young wife slipping into insanity, in Private Worlds (1935) with Joel McCrea who played her husband Dr. Alex MacGregor. Bennett starred in the film Vogues of 1938 (1937), including the title sequence, in which she donned a diamond-and-platinum bracelet set with the Star of Burma ruby. Wanger and director Tay Garnett persuaded her to change her hair from blonde to brunette as part of the plot for her role as Kay Kerrigan in the scenic Trade Winds (1938) opposite Fredric March.
Brunette roles With her change in appearance, Bennett began an entirely new screen career as her persona evolved into that of a glamorous, seductive femme fatale. She played the role of Princess Maria Theresa in The Man in the Iron Mask (1939) opposite Louis Hayward, and the role of the Grand Duchess Zona of Lichtenburg in The Son of Monte Cristo (1940) opposite Hayward.
During his search for an actress to play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, producer David O. Selznick asked Bennett if she could make a screen test. She agreed because Scarlett was "such a plum role". She worked on her Southern accent for several weeks with dialogue director Bill Price. Bennett's test consisted of three scenes, and she impressed Selznick to such an extent that she became one of the four actresses who were tested in color, along with Jean Arthur, Paulette Goddard, and Vivien Leigh. According to Bennett, she and Leigh were Selznick's last two choices, but he sent her a letter that read, "The Scarlett hour has arrived; and the decision, unfortunately, is against our Joanie. I am more grateful than I can say for your effort, which was magnificent."
Combined with her sultry eyes and husky voice, Bennett's new brunette look gave her an earthier, more arresting persona. She won praise for her performances as Brenda Bentley in The House Across the Bay (1940), also featuring George Raft, and as Carol Hoffman in the anti-Nazi drama The Man I Married, a film in which Francis Lederer also starred.
Bennett's first film for Fritz Lang was the 20th Century-Fox production Man Hunt (1941), co-starring Walter Pidgeon. She considered Lang "the incomparable director" and described Man Hunt as "a circumstance that would be an important boost for me as an actress." She was cast as a Cockney woman named Jerry Stokes, and for weeks before filming began she practiced her accent with English actress Queenie Leonard. Bennett later said, "It was the only movie I ever made in which I knew the entire script, like a play, beforehand." In her autobiography, she wrote about her working relationship with Lang:
Bennett was Henry Fonda's leading lady in Wild Geese Calling (1941). Lang was going to direct Bennett again in the 20th Century-Fox film Confirm or Deny (1941), but he quarreled with the studio heads and walked out after one week of filming. She played the female leads in three comedies released in 1942: The Wife Takes a Flyer, with Franchot Tone; Twin Beds, with George Brent; and Girl Trouble, with Don Ameche. Otto Preminger directed her in the drama Margin for Error (1943).
Bennett replaced Merle Oberon in the title role of Fritz Lang's film noir The Woman in the Window (1944), co-starring Edward G. Robinson and featuring Dan Duryea. It was her second film with Lang and she later remembered, "Its success equaled that of Man Hunt, and ours seemed a most fortuitous working relationship. Bennett also accepted the role Oberon left vacant in the Technicolor musical Nob Hill (1945), co-starring George Raft. She told Louella Parsons, "It looks as if I am inheriting all Merle Oberon's cast offs. First, The Woman in the Window, and now Nob Hill."
Walter Wanger, Fritz Lang, and Bennett formed an independent production company named Diana Productions. Their first film was Scarlet Street (1945), Bennett's second film with Robinson and Duryea. It was another box-office hit. There were plans for a third Robinson-Bennett film, Mauve Decade, but it was never made.
Bennett was the shrewish, cuckolding wife, Margaret Macomber, in Zoltan Korda's The Macomber Affair (1947) opposite Gregory Peck, as deceitful wife Peggy Butler, in Jean Renoir's The Woman on the Beach (also 1947) opposite Robert Ryan and Charles Bickford, and as tormented Lucia Harper in Max Ophüls' The Reckless Moment (1949) as the victim of Martin Donnelly, a blackmailer played by James Mason. Then, easily shifting images again, she changed her screen persona to that of an elegant, witty and nurturing wife and mother in two comedies directed by Vincente Minnelli. Playing the role of Ellie Banks, the wife of Stanley Banks (Spencer Tracy) and mother of Kay Banks (Elizabeth Taylor), Bennett appeared in both Father of the Bride (1950) and Father's Little Dividend (1951).
Bennett made a number of radio appearances from the 1930s to the 1950s, performing on such programs as The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, Duffy's Tavern, The Jack Benny Program, Ford Theater, Suspense and the anthology series Lux Radio Theater and Screen Guild Theater.
With the increasing popularity of television, Bennett made five guest appearances in 1951, including an episode of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca's Your Show of Shows. A restored kinescope of her April 26, 1951 appearance on episode 4 of James Melton's Ford Festival TV show (alongside Victor Borge and Dorothy Warenskjold) is viewable online.
Blacklisting