Constance Bennett

Constance Campbell Bennett was born in New York City on 22 October 1904, into a theatrical family: her father was actor Richard Bennett, and her sisters Barbara and Joan Bennett also became actresses. She appeared in New York-produced silent films as a teenager before a chance encounter with producer Samuel Goldwyn led to her formal Hollywood debut in Cytherea (1924). She left films for several years following her second marriage, to the wealthy Henri de la Falaise, before returning to Hollywood at the dawn of the sound era and becoming, briefly, the highest-paid actress in the industry in the early 1930s, commanding fees that exceeded most of her male contemporaries. She specialized in glamorous, often melodramatic society-women roles, most memorably in What Price Hollywood? (1932), a forerunner of A Star Is Born, before shifting toward comedy later in the decade. Her signature role came in Topper (1937) and its sequel Topper Takes a Trip (1938), playing the ghost Marion Kerby opposite Roland Young, films that let her demonstrate a light comic touch distinct from her earlier dramatic image. Bennett was also a shrewd businesswoman, running her own cosmetics line and later a clothing business, unusual independence for an actress of her era. Her film career slowed through the 1940s and 1950s as she worked more in theater and television, and she did charitable and wartime work that led to her later burial at Arlington National Cemetery. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Fort Dix, New Jersey, on 24 July 1965, at sixty.