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Joan Bennett 🅰🄳🅳🄴🅳 🆅🄸🅳🄴🅾🅂

Publication date: 1910

Topics: Joan Bennett

The title of actress Joan Bennett's 1970 autobiography is The Bennett Playbill, in reference to the fact that she came from an old and well-established theatrical family: her father was stage star Richard Bennett and her sisters were screen actresses Constance and Barbara Bennett. Though she made an appearance as a child in one of her father's films, Joan Bennett did not originally intend to pursue acting as a profession. Honoring her wishes, her father bundled her off to finishing school in Versailles. Alas, her impulsive first marriage at 16 ended in divorce, leaving her a single mother in dire need of an immediate source of income. Thus it was that she became a professional actress, making her first Broadway appearance in her father's vehicle, Jarnegan (1928). In 1929, she began her film career in the low-budget effort Power, then co-starred with Ronald Colman in Bulldog Drummond. She was inexperienced and awkward and she knew it, but Bennett applied herself to her craft and improved rapidly; by the early '30s she was a busy and popular ingénue, appearing in such enjoyable programmers as Me and My Gal (1932) and important A-pictures like Little Women (1933) (as Amy). During this period she briefly married again to writer/producer Gene Markey. It was her third husband, producer Walter Wanger, who made the decision that changed the direction of her career: in Wanger's Trade Winds (1938), Bennett was obliged to dye her blonde hair black for plot purposes. Audiences approved of this change, and Bennett thrived throughout the next decade in a wide variety of "dark" roles befitting her brunette status. She was especially effective in a series of melodramas directed by Fritz Lang: Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), and The Secret Beyond the Door (1948). In 1950, she switched professional gears again, abandoning femme-fatale roles for the part of Spencer Tracy's ever-patient spouse in Father of the Bride (1950). Though her personal life was turbulent in the early '50s -- her husband Walter Wanger allegedly shot and wounded agent Jennings Lang, claiming that Lang was trying to steal his wife -- Bennett's professional life continued unabated on both stage and screen. Her television work included the 1959 sitcom Too Young to Go Steady and the "gothic" soap opera Dark Shadows (1965-1971). In failing health, Joan Bennett spent her last years in retirement with her fourth husband, media critic David Wilde.

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Addeddate: 2023-04-18 14:32:19

Color: color

Identifier: big-brown-eyes.-1936

Scanner: Internet Archive HTML5 Uploader 1.7.0

Sound: sound

Year: 1910

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Reviewer: Count David - - January 18, 2024
Subject: Dark Shadows

Ms. Bennett also starred in the original "Dark Shadows" TV series (1966-71) and its theatrical spinoff movie, "House of Dark Shadows" (1970.) Her roles on "Dark Shadows" were Elizabeth Collins Stoddard and several of Elizabeth's ancestors: Naomi, Flora, and Judith Collins!

Dark Shadows: Complete Series (1966-71)
https://www.archive.org/details/dark-shadows_202210

Dark Shadows:
https://wikiwand.com/en/Dark_Shadows

The best online Dark Shadows site is The Collinsport Historical Society: www.collinsporthistoricalsociety.com

Reviewer: JTDIVER - - January 13, 2024
Subject: Sassy Hutt

Thank you for pointing out the problem with For Heaven's Sake 1950. I have UPLOADED the correct copy so enjoy

JTDIVER

Reviewer: Sassy Hutt - - January 12, 2024
Subject: For Heaven's Sake (1950)

The listing "For Heaven's Sake (1950)" is in error as the linked file is actually the 1926 film of the same name with Harold Lloyd.

Thanks very much for sharing some great films. Cheers.

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