Grave of Joan Bennett

Born in 1910 in New Jersey and hailing from a family of actors, the career of Joan Bennett spans silent film all the way through to television movies, with somewhere around 80 feature films on her resume. Throughout that long career, she worked with many of the legends of the business, including directors such as Fritz Lang and James Whale and actors such as Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn.

In 1966 she began playing Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, the reclusive matriarch of the Collins family in the darkly supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows, and she continued with the show all the way through to its end in 1971, after 1,225 episodes and a feature film. The other notable role on her resume is as Madame Blanc, the vice directress of a ballet school/witches coven in Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria.

Bennett died at the age of 80 in 1990 and was buried in a family plot in New England. Her grave can be found in Pleasant View Cemetery, right off Salem Road in Old Lyme, CT. While small, the cemetery is set on a hill and commands a majestic view of the area, and the family stone stands out in the cemetery due to its height and its cathedral-window shape.

Adapted with Permission from: The New England Grimpendium by J.W. Ocker