Richard Bennett

Biography

Deer Creek, Indiana, greeted the world with Richard Bennett on 21 May 1870. Over the next seven decades he carved a commanding niche on stage and screen, his baritone and piercing gaze immortalized in The Home Towners (1928), Arrowsmith (1931) and, at seventy-two, as the doomed Major Amberson in Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Between curtain calls he found time for three marriages—to Aimee Raisch Hastings, Adrienne Morrison and Grena Heller—and for scripting stories that mirrored his own restless spirit. The final curtain fell in Los Angeles on 22 October 1944, but the echo of his performances still reverberates through every print that bears his name.