Joan Bennett
American stage, film, and television actress
Died when: 80 years 283 days (969 months)Star Sign: Pisces
Joan Geraldine Bennett (February 27, 1910 – December 7, 1990) was an American stage, film, and television actress.She came from a show-business family, one of three acting sisters.
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, and Flora Collins PT) in the gothic 1960s soap opera Dark Shadows, for which she received an Emmy nomination 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 Lang and she were having an affair, a charge which Bennett adamantly denied.She married four times.
For her final film role, as Madame Blanc in Dario Argento's cult horror film Suspiria (1977), she received a Saturn Award nomination.
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American stage, film, and television actress
American stage, film, and television actress
American stage, film, and television actress