Constance Bennett

Constance Bennett was Hollywood aristocracy by birth, the daughter of matinee-idol stage actor Richard Bennett and the elder sister of star Joan Bennett. Sleek, blonde, and impeccably worldly, she projected a cool, moneyed glamour that made her the perfect fantasy figure for Depression audiences, and for a few years no actress in America was more richly rewarded. At her peak in the early 1930s she was the highest-paid woman in Hollywood, famously commanding thirty thousand dollars a week, an almost unimaginable sum for the time.

Her signature early roles were glossy tales of fallen women and self-sacrifice, but two films secured her lasting place in movie history. In What Price Hollywood? (1932) she played a waitress lifted to stardom by a self-destructing director, the template that would be reworked several years later into A Star Is Born. And in Topper (1937), she reinvented herself as a light comedienne, playing the elegant, mischievous ghost who haunts and torments a staid banker, a sparkling hit that spawned sequels and proved her range extended well past melodrama.

Bennett was as formidable a businesswoman as she was a star, negotiating her own extraordinary contracts, dabbling in producing, and later running a cosmetics and clothing enterprise under her own name. Her private life kept the columns busy, including a much-publicized marriage to the Marquis de la Falaise, a titled European who had previously been wed to Gloria Swanson.

As her box-office reign passed, her film appearances grew infrequent, though she never fully retired, moving between occasional pictures, the stage, and her business ventures. She died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1965, just after completing a remake of Madame X, which reached theaters after her death. In her prime she had been the very definition of Hollywood chic and one of its shrewdest operators, a star who understood the industry as a business as clearly as anyone in it.