Background
Bennett, Joan was born on February 27, 1910 in Palisades, New Jersey, United States. The daughter of actor Richard Bennett and younger sister of actress Constance Bennett.
Bennett, Joan was born on February 27, 1910 in Palisades, New Jersey, United States. The daughter of actor Richard Bennett and younger sister of actress Constance Bennett.
Joan Bennett was educated in Connecticut and Paris.
After a rapid marriage and divorce she worked as an extra in The Divine Lady (29, Frank Lloyd). Her father then helped her into a larger part in Bulldog Drummond (29, E. Richard Jones) and she quickly became a blonde romantic lead. In fact, she made some forty movies before coming to the parts for which she is justly remembered.
The blonde, pre-Walter Wanger years saw her in the George Arliss Disraeli (29, Alfred E. Green); in Lloyd Bacon's Moby Dick (30); Wellmans Maybe It’s Love (30); Borzages Doctors’ Wives (31); She Wanted a Millionaire (32, John Blystone); Wild Girl (32) and Me and My Gal (32), both for Raoul Walsh; a demure Amy in Cukors Little Women (33). At this stage she met Wanger and signed a contract with him. Her talent for comedy improved in The Pursuit of Happiness (34, Alexander Hall); Mississippi (35, Edward Sutherland); She Couldn’t Take It (35, Tay Garnett); and The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo (35, Stephen Roberts). In 1936 she made Thirteen Hours by Air for Mitchell Leisen and Big Brown Eyes for Walsh, and in 1937 Wanger showcased her in Vogues of 1938 (Irving Cummings).
It was only in 1938, in a Tay Garnett romantic thriller, Trade Winds, that she changed from blonde to brunette. It is worth noting that Constance was blonde and that Joan flourished only when her sister was in decline. After Artists and Models Abroad (38) with Jack Benny for Leisen, she had a bustle of costume movies with Louis Hayward, including The Man in the Iron Mask (39, James Whale) and Son of Monte Cristo (40, Rowland V. Lee).
She starred in some very important films of her career: first in Pichel’s The Man I Married (41) and then crucially in Lang’s Man Hunt (41). Plaving a London tart in that film, she revealed a special, sentimental coarseness that had never emerged before. She then made Wild Geese Calling (41, John Brahm); Confirm or Deny (41), a Lang project taken over by Mayo; and Margin for Error (43), one of the films Otto Preminger chose to disown. In 1944, she was Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window, trapping Edward G. Robinson into dream, and then in 1946 she was brilliant as Lazv- Legs, who again brought disaster to Robinson in Scarlet Street (Lang). Whereas in Woman in the Window she is alluring, in Scarlet Street she is casually corrupt and endearingly vulgar. Not surprisingly, it is a continental performance in a film that seems to have very little to do with America, and its honest portrait of sensuality only makes some of the official love goddesses of 1946 look reserved.
She was the girl from Nob Hill (45) slumming with George Raft for Hathaway; in Colonel Effing¬ham's Raid (46) for Pichel; and Hemingway’s two- timing wife in Zoltán Korda's The Macomber Affair (47) before an astonishing trio of "European” films in America such as the blonde girlie of the 1930s might never have dreamed of: The Woman on the Beach (47, Jean Renoir); The Secret Beyond the Door (48, Lang); and The Reckless Moment (49, Max Ophuls)—the last two produced by her husband. Next, she had a great popular success as an ideal mother and grand-mother in Minnelli s Father of the Bride (50) and Father’s Little Dividend (51). But such domestic bliss was belied when Wanger felt compelled to shoot his wife’s agent, Jennings Lang. He went briefly to prison and was reunited with Joan in 1953.
She never again starred in a good film and, as well as touring in several plays, she made: The Guy Who Came Back (51, Joseph M. Newman); Highway Dragnet (54, Nathan Juran); We’re No Angels (55, Michael Curtiz); Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow (56); and then Desire in the Dust (60, William Claxton). In the mid-1960s she appeared to have retired, but when Wanger died in 1968 she
took on a TV series, Dark Shadows, which in 1970 turned into an unnecessary film. In 1976, she played the head teacher in Suspiria (Dario Argento), and she appeared in a couple of TV movies: This House Possessed (81, William Wiard) and Divorce Wars: A Love Story (82, Donald Wye).
At sixteen she ran away with a millionaire and had a child—at much the same time that Constance eloped with a millionaire.
She divorced her second husband and made The House Across the Bay (40, Archie L. Mayo) for Wanger. She married him the next year and entered her most rewarding period as an actress.