Book description
" The Bennetts: An Acting Family is a chronicle of one of the
royal families of stage and screen. The saga begins with Richard
Bennett, a small-town Indiana roughneck who grew up to be one of the
bright lights of the New York stage during the early twentieth century.
In time, however, Richard's fame was eclipsed by that of his daughters,
Constance and Joan, who went to Hollywood in the 1920s and found major
success there. Constance became the highest-paid actress of the early
1930s, earning as much as ,000 a week in melodramas. Later she
reinvented herself as a comedienne in the classic comedy Topper , with
Cary Grant.. After a slow start as a blonde ingenue, Joan dyed her hair
black and became one of the screen's great temptresses in films such as
Scarlet Street . She also starred in such lighter fare as Father of the
Bride . In the 1960s, Joan gained a new generation of fans when she
appeared in the gothic daytime television serial Dark Shadows . The
Bennetts is also the story of another Bennett sister, Barbara, whose
promising beginnings as a dancer gave way to a turbulent marriage to
singer Morton Downey and a steady decline into alcoholism. Constance and
Joan were among Hollywood's biggest stars, but their personal lives were
anything but serene. In 1943, Constance became entangled in a highly
publicized court battle with the family of her millionaire ex-husband,
and in 1951, Joan's husband, producer Walter Wanger, shot her lover in
broad daylight, sparking one of the biggest Hollywood scandals of the
1950s. Brian Kellow, features editor of Opera News magazine, is the
coauthor of Can't Help Singing: The Life of Eileen Farrell . He lives in
New York and Connecticut.
