- Was afflicted by alcoholism and depression, eventually taking her own life after a court awarded custody of her five children to her husband, the entertainer Morton Downey.
- Mother of Morton Downey Jr.
- Daughter of actors Richard Bennett and Adrienne Morrison.
- Grandfather W. Morrison was of African Creole descent.
- Worked as a ballroom dancer in the 1920s.
- Her daughter, Lorelle Ann Downey, had a nervous breakdown at age 14 and showed behavioral problems. Bennett's ex-husband and father of Lorelle, singer Morton Downey, had her institutionalized in Pennsylvania and while there, she underwent a frontal lobotomy. She was smothered to death in 1977 by a fellow mental patient.
- Granddaughter of Rose Wood and stage actor Lewis Morrison, birth name: Morris W. Morris (1845-1906).
- Aunt of Gyl Roland.
- Sister of actresses Constance Bennett and Joan Bennett.
- Screen and stage actress.
- According to a 1989 Chicago Tribune interview with Bennett's son, talk-show host Morton Downey, Jr., doctors told him that his mother actually died of a herniated diaphragm and it is suspected that she had suffocated herself.
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