Richard Bennett, christened Clarence Charles William Henry Richard, was born on May 21, 1870, in Deacons Mills, Cass County, Indiana, the older of two children and only son of George Washington and Eliza Leonora (Hoffman) Bennett. Like his pioneer forebears who had migrated to Indiana from New Jersey, George Bennett owned and operated a sawmill and served as a lay evangelical preacher; he was later sheriff of Howard County, Indiana.
Young Richard attended schools in Kokomo and Logansport, Indiana. He acted in church and school theatricals as a boy; his mother encouraged his stage aspirations, but his father wanted him to enter the lumber business. Instead, Bennett left home and worked at a wide variety of odd jobs and occupations that included professional boxing, working aboard a Great Lakes steamer, and traveling with a medicine show. His quick temper and ready resort to fists made it necessary for him to keep moving.
After joining a tent show and then a minstrel troupe, Bennett attracted the attention of Joe Coyne, an English actor touring with The Limited Mail, who gave Bennett a job with the company. He made his professional debut in that melodrama at the Standard Theater in Chicago on May 10, 1891, and soon graduated to the juvenile lead, Tombstone Jake. Near the end of the tour he appeared at Niblo's Garden in New York. Other road engagements followed, mostly in the Midwest, including two under the management of Gustave Frohman. In 1897, Gustave's brother Charles hired Bennett for the juvenile lead in The Proper Caper, which brought him again to New York. This marked the beginning of Bennett's long but not exclusive association with Charles Frohman, under whose tutelage he developed into a matinee idol in a series of hits.
In 1905 Bennett was graduated to more cerebral drama with the part of Hector Malone, opposite Clara Bloodgood, in Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. Then came the role of Jefferson Ryder, the young hero of Charles Klein's The Lion and the Mouse (1905); when the play was taken overseas in 1906, Bennett made his London debut at the Duke of York's Theater. Two years later Frohman selected him to play John Shand opposite Maude Adams in Sir James Barrie's What Every Woman Knows.
In 1913 Bennett undertook a daring venture. He had acquired the rights to Damaged Goods, Eugene Brieux's controversial study of the devastating social effects of hereditary syphilis. Despite many difficulties, he secured the endorsement of civic and health groups and managed to have it produced, first at special matinees, then for a regular run. He starred in the play, which had a successful tour, and later in a cinematic version. He also addressed clubs, church groups, and theater audiences, scoring the hypocrisy that veiled the subject and advocating compulsory use of the Wassermann test in the issuance of marriage licenses. A subsequent Brieux play, Maternity (1915), a plea for legalized abortion, was not successful, but Bennett's role in it indicated his commitment to unpopular social causes.
Though Bennett occasionally returned to melodrama, he was becoming recognized as a leading actor in the artistic and realistic revolution in American drama after World War I. In February 1920 he was largely instrumental in persuading John D. Williams to put on Eugene O'Neill's first long play, Beyond the Horizon, in special matinees. Bennett was acclaimed as the poetical, tubercular hero, and the play won a regular engagement and the season's Pulitzer Prize. In other notable performances he played Andrew Lane in The Hero (1921), "He" in the Theater Guild's production of Leonid Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped (1922), and Tony in They Knew What They Wanted (1924), by Sidney Howard, a paean to the new postwar morality.
For a time Bennett transferred most of his theatrical activities to the West Coast and to Hollywood, but he returned to Broadway in 1935 to take the role of Judge Gaunt in Winterset, Maxwell Anderson's poetical sequel to the Sacco-Vanzetti case. In 1938 he went into rehearsal as Gramp in On Borrowed Time, but was forced to withdraw before the New York opening because of memory blocks. Bennett subsequently took part in the founding of Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, at which he directed several plays and gave readings.
Bennett, besides acting in some 150 plays, appeared in occasional silent and sound films, among them Arrowsmith (1931) and Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Journey into Fear (1943). Bennett was residing in Los Angeles when he contracted his final illness, arteriosclerotic heart disease, which led to his death from pulmonary edema in the Good Samaritan Hospital there in 1944. After funeral services in All Saints Episcopal Church, Beverly Hills, California, he was buried in the Morrison family plot in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
Richard Bennett was a well-known American actor who acted in some 150 plays and appeared in many silent and sound films. Some of his major works: The Lion and the Mouse (1905); Maternity (1915); Lane in The Hero (1921); He Who Gets Slapped (1922); They Knew What They Wanted (1924); Arrowsmith (1931); The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); and Journey into Fear (1943), etc.
Richard Bennett was a handsome, aggressive, and dynamic actor brought up in the nineteenth-century tradition of stars and touring companies. From the start he was an honest and conscientious performer. On stage Bennett was famous for his curtain speeches and for his biting ad libs, usually directed at late arrivals or noisy audiences. Despite his antics, he was serious about his art.
Quotes from others about the person
According to the critic Elinor L. Hughes, Bennett would learn all the other roles in a play before memorizing his lines, thus gradually arriving at his own interpretation. As he grew older, he developed from matinee idol to consummate character actor. Eugene O'Neill, at first irritated by Bennett's extensive cutting and rewriting of lines in Beyond the Horizon, soon admitted that "Bennett is really a liberal education" and that the experience had made him a better playwright.
Richard Bennett's personal life, meanwhile, almost rivaled his theatrical career in making the news. His first marriage, to Grena Heller in San Francisco in 1901, ended in divorce after two years. (Grena Bennett went on to become music critic for the New York Journal-American for over forty years. ) On November 8, 1903, he married Mabel Morrison, known on the stage as Adrienne Morrison (they had performed together in 1900). This second marriage, graced by the birth of three daughters - Constance Campbell, Barbara Jane, and Joan Geraldine - was considered ideally successful for twenty years. But a separation in 1923 was followed two years later by divorce. Unhappiness over the divorce led to the beginning of the heavy drinking that sometimes made Bennett's later work uneven. On July 11, 1927, he married an actress who had appeared in his stock company, Mrs. Aimee (Raisch) Hastings of San Francisco. They separated in 1934 and were divorced in 1937. Two of Bennett's daughters achieved stardom in motion pictures.
