Constance Bennett

Constance Campbell Bennett (October 22, 1904 – July 24, 1965) was an American actress and producer who worked across stage, film, radio, and television. Born in New York City to actor Richard Bennett and actress Adrienne Morrison, she was the eldest of three daughters, all of whom became actresses. Her younger sisters were Joan Bennett and Barbara Bennett. All three girls attended the Chapin School in New York.

Bennett entered silent films through New York productions before a meeting with Samuel Goldwyn led to her Hollywood debut in Cytherea (1924). She left her film career to marry millionaire socialite Philip Morgan Plant in 1925 but returned to acting following their divorce in 1929, at the beginning of the sound era. Her comeback proved highly lucrative: in 1931, a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer paid her $300,000 for two pictures, including The Easiest Way, and Warner Brothers paid her $30,000 per week for Bought!, in which her father Richard Bennett also appeared. These deals made her one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood during the early 1930s.

At RKO, Bennett starred in What Price Hollywood? (1932), directed by George Cukor, playing waitress Mary Evans, who rises to become a movie star. Lowell Sherman co-starred as the director who discovers her, and Neil Hamilton played the wealthy playboy she marries and later divorces. The film Morning Glory had been written with Bennett in mind for its lead role, but producer Pandro S. Berman cast Katharine Hepburn instead, and Hepburn won an Academy Award for the performance. Bennett went on to appear in Our Betters (1933), Bed of Roses (1933) with Pert Kelton, After Tonight (1933), The Affairs of Cellini (1934), and After Office Hours (1935) opposite Clark Gable. Her role as Marian Kerby opposite Cary Grant in the supernatural comedy Topper (1937) became one of her most recognized performances, and she reprised it in Topper Takes a Trip (1938). She also appeared in the family comedy Merrily We Live (1938) and in Two-Faced Woman (1941), supporting Greta Garbo in what proved to be Garbo's final film.

By the 1940s, Bennett was working less frequently in film while remaining active in radio and theatre. She hosted her own program, Constance Bennett Calls on You, on ABC Radio in 1945–1946. Her film work during the decade included a major supporting role in The Unsuspected (1947), in which she played Jane Moynihan, a program director who helps expose radio host Victor Grandison, played by Claude Rains, as a murderer. In the 1950s, she appeared opposite Marilyn Monroe in As Young as You Feel (1951) and played herself in a cameo in It Should Happen to You (1954). Her final screen appearance came in Madame X (1965), in which she played a blackmailing mother-in-law; the film was released posthumously in 1966.

Bennett's Broadway career spanned from 1953 to 1958. She appeared in A Date With April and starred in the comedy Auntie Mame, a role she also toured across the United States in 1957–1958. Bennett holds a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to film, located at 6250 Hollywood Boulevard, near the star of her sister Joan.

Bennett was married five times. Her first marriage, to Chester Hirst Moorehead in 1921, was annulled in 1923. She married Philip Morgan Plant in 1925; they divorced in a French court in 1929. In 1931, she married Henri le Bailly, the Marquis de La Falaise, a French nobleman and film director who had previously been married to Gloria Swanson. Together, Bennett and de la Falaise founded Bennett Pictures Corp. and co-produced two Technicolor films: Legong: Dance of the Virgins (1935), shot on location in Bali, and Kilou the Killer Tiger (1936), filmed in Indochina. They divorced in Reno, Nevada, in 1940. Her fourth marriage was to actor Gilbert Roland in 1941; they had two daughters, Lorinda and Christina, and divorced in 1946. That same year, Bennett married U.S. Air Force Colonel John Theron Coulter, her fifth and final husband. Following their marriage, she devoted considerable effort to providing entertainment to American troops stationed in Europe and received military honors for that work.

Bennett died on July 24, 1965, at the age of 60. As the wife of John Theron Coulter, who attained the rank of brigadier general, she was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Coulter died in 1995 and was interred beside her.