Jill Bennett (British Actress) - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

She was born in Penang, The Straits Settlements, to British parents, educated at Priors Field, an independent girls boarding school in Godalming, and trained at RADA. She made her stage début in the 1949 season at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford upon Avon, and her film début in The Long Dark Hall (1951).

Bennett made many appearances in British films during the 1950s and 1960s, notably The Nanny (1965) (with Bette Davis), Inadmissible Evidence (1968), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Calpurnia to John Gielgud's Caesar in a 1970 version of Julius Caesar and as Margaret Stevenson in I Want What I Want (film) (1972). She also had small roles in Britannia Hospital (1982), as a world renowned ice skating coach in For Your Eyes Only (1981), Lady Jane (film) (1986) and her final film performance in The Sheltering Sky (1990).

She made forays into television, most notably in Country with Wendy Hiller in 1981 and as the colourful Lady Grace Fanner in the adaptation of John Mortimer's novel, Paradise Postponed (1985). Among several roles, Osborne wrote the character of Annie in his play The Hotel in Amsterdam for her. But Bennett's busy schedule prevented her from playing the role until it was televised in 1971.

In 1979 she co-starred with Rachel Roberts in the LWT drama, The Old Crowd, directed by Lindsay Anderson with a screenplay by Alan Bennett, who later gently pointed out in the index to his collection of prose, Untold Stories (Faber 2005): "No relation".