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".
Read more about this topic: Jill Bennett (British Actress)
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
—Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)
“There is in him, hidden deep-down, a great instinctive artist, and hence the makings of an aristocrat. In his muddled way, held back by the manacles of his race and time, and his steps made uncertain by a guiding theory which too often eludes his own comprehension, he yet manages to produce works of unquestionable beauty and authority, and to interpret life in a manner that is poignant and illuminating.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)