Joan Bennett

She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for services to Motion Pictures, at 6310 Hollywood Boulevard. Due to scheduling conflicts the scene was shown on the Los Angelas set of General Hospital, instead of the New York set where All My Children is taped. Bennett died from a heart attack in Scarsdale, New York and was buried in Pleasant View Cemetery, Lyme, Connecticut. She hosted a 25th Aniversary special about the show in 1995, and made a brief cameo as Verla on the January 5th 2005 episode celebrating the 35th aniversary of the program. She continued to work steadily in theatre and television and was a cast member of the television series Dark Shadows for its entire five year run, from 1966 until 1971, receiving an Emmy Award nomination for her role. Burnett suddenly found herself playing the long lost daughter of Langly Wallingford (Louis Edmonds), and raising hell for her stepmother Pheobe Tyler-Wallingford (Ruth Warrick). In 1951 Wanger shot and injured Bennett's agent, who was also her lover, and the resulting scandal damaged her career. She got to live a dream when Agnes Nixon created the role of Verla Grubbs for her.

She also played the wife of Spencer Tracy in Father of the Bride (1950) and its sequel, Father's Little Dividend (1951). Burnett has been a long time fan of the soap opera All My Children. Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street established her as a film noir femme fatale. Burnett was a recipient of Kennedy Center Honors for 2003. In the early 1940s Bennett appeared in a trio of films directed by Fritz Lang. Burnett returned to TV in the mid 1990's as a supporting character on the sitcom Mad About You when she played Theresa Stemple, the mother of main character Jamie Buchman, played by Helen Hunt. She was briefly considered to be a front runner for this part but Selznick eventually turned his attention to Paulette Goddard, who was then rejected in favour of Vivien Leigh. The case is a landmark in the study of libel cases involving celebrities, although the unprecedented $1.6 million verdict was reduced on appeal, and the case was eventually settled out of court.

Selznick. Burnett drew attention in 1981, when she sued the National Enquirer for libel after the tabloid newspaper described her alleged public drunkenness. During the search to find an actress to play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind, Bennett was tested and impressed producer David O. Its ensemble cast included Tim Conway, Harvey Korman, Lyle Waggoner and Vicki Lawrence, who was cast partly because she looked like a younger Burnett. With this change her screen persona evolved into that of a glamorous seductress and she began to attract attention. The hour-long The Carol Burnett Show was a huge success, garnering 22 Emmy awards and continuing to success in syndicated re-runs. He managed her career, and with director Tay Garnett convinced her to change her hair from blonde to brunette. With her success on this variety show she finally came to headliner status and appeared in the 1962 special Julie and Carol and Carnegie Hall, also starring fellow singer/actress Julie Andrews.

She signed a contract with producer Walter Wanger, whom she would marry in 1940. In the same year she appeared on the Garry Moore television variety show as a regular until 1962. Her task was further complicated by the rapid rise to fame of her sister Constance, who at this time was one of Hollywood's most successful and popular actresses, and with whom she was unfavourably compared. She achieved success in Broadway in the 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress. She was not taken seriously as an actress and struggled to establish herself. She graduated from Hollywood High School and the University of California, Los Angeles, and worked her way up through bit parts on TV, coming to prominence in the mid-1950s singing a novelty love song, "I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles". Contracted to 20th Century Fox she appeared as a blonde ingenue in a several films including Puttin' on the Ritz in 1930, before leaving this studio to appear in Little Women (1933). Burnett was born in San Antonio, Texas to two alcoholic parents, who left her with her grandmother, who moved to Hollywood, California.

She married at the age of sixteen, and when this marriage ended two years later, resumed her acting career. Carol Burnett (born April 26, 1933) was one of the most successful female comedians on American television, thanks largely to her variety show that ran on CBS from 1967 through 1978. Bennett made her first film appearance in 1918 in an uncredited part and appeared in a few silent films while a child. Born in Palisades, New Jersey, Bennett was the daughter of stage actors Richard Bennett and Adrienne Morrison, and was the younger sister of actresses Constance Bennett and Barbara Bennett. Joan Geraldine Bennett (February 27, 1910 - December 7, 1990) was an American film actress who also achieved success later in life as a television actress.