40 Gorgeous Photos of Joan Bennett in the 1930s

Born 1910 in Fort Lee, New Jersey, American actress Joan Bennett was one of three acting sisters from a show-business family. Beginning her career on the stage, she appeared in more than 70 films from the era of silent films, well into the sound era.

Bennett is best remembered for her film noir femme fatale roles in director Fritz Lang’s films—including Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944), and Scarlet Street (1945)—and for her television role as matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (and ancestors Naomi Collins, Judith Collins Trask, and Flora Collins in various timelines) in the gothic 1960s soap opera Dark Shadows, for which she received an Emmy nomination in 1968.

In 1951, Bennett’s screen career was marred by scandal after her third husband, film producer Walter Wanger, shot and injured her agent Jennings Lang. Wanger suspected that she and Lang were having an affair, a charge which she adamantly denied. She married four times.

For her final film role, as Madame Blanc in Dario Argento’s cult horror film Suspiria (1977), Bennett received a Saturn Award nomination. She died of heart failure in 1990, aged 80, at her home in Scarsdale, New York. Take a look at these gorgeous photos to see the beauty of a young Joan Bennett in the 1930s.