Early Life
She was born in the Palisades section of Fort Lee, New Jersey, the third of three daughters of actor Richard Bennett and actress/literary agent Adrienne Morrison. Her older sisters were actress Constance Bennett and actress/dancer Barbara Bennett, who was the mother of Morton Downey, Jr.
Part of a famous theatrical family, Bennett's maternal grandfather was Jamaica-born Shakespearean actor Lewis Morrison, who embarked on a stage career in the late 1860s. He was of English and Spanish ancestry. On the side of her maternal grandmother, actress Rose Wood, the profession dated back to traveling minstrels in 18th century England.
Bennett first appeared in a silent movie as a child with her parents and sisters in her father's drama The Valley of Decision (1916), which he adapted for the screen. She attended Miss Hopkins School for Girls in Manhattan, then St. Margaret's, a boarding school in Waterbury, Connecticut, and L'Hermitage, a finishing school in Versailles, France.
On September 15, 1926, she and John M. Fox were married in London. They were divorced on July 30, 1928 in Los Angeles. They had one child, Adrienne Ralston Fox (born February 20, 1928, later named Diana Bennett Markey, then Diana Bennett Wanger)
Read more about this topic: Joan Bennett
Famous quotes related to early life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)