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[John Feltham]

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Bennett,  (Nora Noel) Jill  (1929-1990), actress, was born, possibly on 24 December 1929, in Penang, Malaya, the only child of (James) Randle Bennett, an owner of rubber plantations, and his wife, Nora Adeline Beckett. Her death certificate claims that she was born in 1931, but she was reticent about her date of birth. In Who's Who she wrote that she was born in 1929. When war broke out in 1939 her mother took her to England. Her father was taken prisoner by the Japanese, and neither Jill nor her mother saw him again for five years. In England she attended several boarding-schools, including Priors Field, Godalming, Surrey, where, she claimed, she was good at games, French, riding, and the history of art. She was expelled at the age of fourteen. She also showed an early talent for ballet, but at fifteen decided to be an actress and was accepted by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, which she attended in 1944-6. She made her stage debut in 1947 in Now Barabbas (Bolton's Theatre and, later, Vaudeville Theatre).

In 1949 Bennett was given one speaking part and walk-ons with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company at Stratford upon Avon, where she met Godfrey Tearle  (1884-1953), a fine actor, who was more than forty years her senior. From then until his death, they had what she called 'a passionate friendship'. In her book, Godfrey: a Special Time Remembered (written with Suzanne Goodwin in 1983), she makes it clear that he was the great love of her life. She later married twice, both times to playwrights. In 1962 she married Willis Hall  (1929-2005), the son of Walter Hall. Willis Hall wrote, among other things, The Long, the Short and the Tall. The marriage was dissolved in 1965, and in 1968 she married (as his fourth wife) John James Osborne  (1929-1994), the son of Thomas Godfrey Osborne, copy-writer in an advertising agency. John Osborne was the author of Look Back in Anger (1956), which started a new kind of drama in England, known as the kitchen sink drama. They were divorced in 1977. There were no children of either marriage, though she had two miscarriages when married to Osborne. Osborne's hostile picture of her in Almost a Gentleman (1991) is unrecognizable to those who knew her well.

Bennett had a long and successful career in theatre, films, television, and radio. Her first parts in London were as Anni in Captain Carvallo, directed by Laurence Olivier (St James's, 1950), and Iras in both Antony and Cleopatra and Caesar and Cleopatra in the Sir Laurence Olivier season, also at the St James's Theatre (1951). From 1955 she was much in demand, mostly in the West End, notably as Helen Eliot in The Night of the Ball (New Theatre, 1955), Masha in The Seagull (Saville, 1956), and Isabelle in Dinner with the Family (New, 1957). In December 1962 she began her important association with the Royal Court Theatre, as Hilary in The Sponge Room and Elizabeth Mintey in Squat Betty. In 1965 she made the first of her three appearances there in a play by her future husband, John Osborne, as Countess Sophia Delyanoff in A Patriot for Me. She was also in the film versions of Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence and The Charge of the Light Brigade (both 1968). Osborne wrote Time Present-based on her relationship with Godfrey Tearle-for her in 1968, and in it, as Pamela, she won the Evening Standard and Variety Club awards for best actress. Her final Osborne play (also at the Royal Court, and subsequently at the Cambridge Theatre) was West of Suez (1971). She was a memorable Hedda Gabler in 1972, and Fay, in Joe Orton's Loot, in 1975 (both at the Royal Court), and she was highly successful in a revival of Sir Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables, in which she played the contrasting emotional cripples Mrs Shankland and Miss Railton Bell (Apollo, 1977). This was followed by leading parts in successive seasons at the Festival Theatre, Chichester, in 1978 and 1979, which included Miss Tina in The Aspern Papers. Other personal successes included Gertrude in Hamlet-in the opinion of the director, Anthony Page, the best Gertrude he ever saw (Royal Court, 1980)-and the wife in August Strindberg's Dance of Death (Manchester Royal Exchange, 1981).

Bennett's films included Lust for Life (1956), Joseph Losey's The Criminal (1960), The Nanny (with Bette Davis, 1965), Britannia Hospital (1982), and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky (1990). Her many television credits included The Heiress, The Three Sisters, Design for Living, and Rembrandt (all 1970), Alan Bennett's The Old Crowd (1979), and John Mortimer's Paradise Postponed (1986).

No conventional beauty, Bennett considered herself ugly. She was in fact extremely attractive, elegant, petite, blonde, and blue-eyed, with a distinctively turned-up nose, flared nostrils, strong teeth, and a small, amusingly jutting chin. She had quick intelligence and wit, and her laughter was companionable and infectious, but needed to be won. She often indulged in extravagant behaviour, which could be embarrassing. She wrongly believed that she was a failure in her relationships with men. Her friendships were many and long-lasting. For instance, Anthony Page was a friend and colleague for over thirty years, and Lindsay Anderson, the film director, for longer still-as was her loving and much-loved secretary, Linda Drew.

Bennett adored acting but, being sensitive and nervous, preferred the cloistered security of rehearsal, the passionate search for character and motive, and the trusting relationship with her directors to the exposure of performance. When, however, she felt utterly secure in her part, in the play, and in her colleagues, she could be superb. She committed suicide on 5 October 1990 at her home, 23 Gloucester Walk, Kensington, London, by taking an overdose of sleeping-pills, having tried unsuccessfully to do so a month previously. Her relationship with a Swiss businessman, Thomas Schoch, had foundered and her ever-present sense of failure had finally overcome her.

Dulcie Gray 

H. C. G. Matthew 

Sources  J. Bennett and S. Goodwin, Godfrey: a special time remembered (1983) + J. Osborne, Almost a gentleman (1991) + private information (1996) [L. Drew; A. Page] + The Times (6 Oct 1990) + d. cert. + WW + personal knowledge (1996)
Likenesses  P. Procktor, portrait, 1972, priv. coll. [see illus.] · photographs, Hult. Arch.



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