Barbara Jane Bennett entered the world with stage dust already settling in her lungs. Born in Palisades Park in 1906, second of the three Bennett daughters—Constance the poised beauty, Joan the steel-backed star—Barbara was the one who seemed made of raw nerves and quicksilver. Their father, Richard Bennett, ruled the stage like a high priest; their mother, Adrienne Morrison, carried theater in her blood. Drama wasn’t taught in the Bennett house—it was inherited.
The girls grew up polished and proper at the Chapin School, alongside Jane Wyatt, all enunciated vowels and spotless gloves. But Barbara was the one who carried a weather system behind her eyes. Where Constance and Joan cultivated stardom, Barbara cultivated intensity.
A performer in the family business
Barbara’s career began early—silent films, Broadway, the whole tinseled circuit that ran on bright lights and backbreaking rehearsal. She danced. She acted. She moved through the late 1910s and 1920s like a young woman trying to outrun her name while clinging to it for survival. Her biggest splash came with the 1927 Fox picture Black Jack, her face featured boldly on the poster, eyes wide, shoulders squared. For a moment she stood exactly where the Bennett machine expected her to stand.
She co-wrote the waltz Dreaming of My Indiana Sweetheart in 1931—one of those lilting, sentimental songs of the age that seems fragile now, like a pressed flower in a lost book. But the spotlight never clung to Barbara the way it did her sisters. She was built for something more volatile.
The men, the marriages, the fractures
Her first husband was tenor Morton Downey—yes, that Downey, the one whose voice poured out of radios like warm syrup. They had four children together, including future shock-jock Morton Downey Jr., and adopted a fifth. Behind the scenes, the home was not a serenade. The marriage ended in 1941, bruised by storms neither ever fully described.
Barbara then married Addison Randall, a handsome singing cowboy whose screen presence could charm a cactus into blooming. Their romance had that feverish, high-altitude quality—fast, bright, precarious. In 1945, Randall collapsed from a heart attack while filming The Royal Mounted Rides Again and fell from his horse. Barbara stood beside the coffin for a second time in six years, now widowed at 38.
Her third marriage, to Laurent Surprenant, carried her north to Montreal in 1957. It seemed quieter, gentler, a soft landing after years spent ricocheting through emotion and expectation. But demons travel light.
A life that burned too hot
Barbara Bennett attempted suicide four times. Newspapers never named it; Joan Bennett refused interviews; the truth hid itself behind euphemisms like “a long illness.” But those who loved her knew. Louise Brooks—sharp-tongued, haunted, devastatingly candid—wrote in Lulu in Hollywood:
“Barbara made a career of her emotions… Only her death, in 1958, achieved in her fifth suicide attempt, could be termed a success.”
It’s cruel and beautiful in the way only Louise Brooks could be. And it’s the kind of epitaph someone like Barbara would hate, yet maybe, on her worst days, understand.
She died in Montreal on August 8, 1958—five days shy of her 52nd birthday. The middle sister, forever caught between brilliance and collapse. She was buried quietly in Quebec, far from Hollywood’s louche fluorescence.
The woman behind the footnotes
History has a way of treating Barbara Bennett like a tragic afterthought sandwiched between two glamorous sisters. But the truth is stranger and richer: Barbara was the Bennett who felt life the deepest, who loved too urgently, who broke too easily, who burned too brightly. She did not glide through fame—she collided with it. She carved her own space, however messy, however fleeting.
A career made of flickers. A life made of fire.
If you want the next one in this style, just tell me who’s next.
