16 Jul 2021

On the Life, Death, and Shameful Maligning of Jill Bennett by John Osborne

Jill Bennett 
(as Aunt Pen in The Nanny, 1965)
 
 
Jill Bennett (1931-1990) was a British actress and - to her great misfortune - the fourth wife of overrated playwright John Osborne. 
 
Although born overseas (in Penang), Bennett was educated at an independent girls' boarding school in Surrey and trained as an actress at RADA. She made her stage début in 1949 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford upon Avon. Her first movie role followed two years later; a murdered showgirl in The Long Dark Hall (1951). 
 
Bennett went on to build a long and successful career on stage, film and TV. I remember her best as sexy Aunt Pen, in the Hammer horror classic The Nanny (1965), and as Jacoba Brink, a Soviet figure skater hired to train Bibi Dahl (played by Lynn Holly-Johnson), in the 1981 Bond film For Your Eyes Only
 
Her final film performance was as Mrs. Lyle in The Sheltering Sky (1990). She died - by suicide [1] - in October of that year, aged 58, having long suffered from depression which was in no small degree triggered and intensified by her disastrous ten-year marriage to Osborne (1968-1978).    

The latter, who was subject during Bennett's lifetime to a restraining order which prevented him from writing about her or their marriage, immediately wrote a scurrilous chapter about his ex-wife as an addition to the second volume of his autobiography. The chapter, in which he rejoiced at her death, rightly caused controversy; this wasn't simply looking back in anger by a bitter old man, this was a vile display of toxic masculinity.  
 
Bennett undoubtedly had her faults: maybe, as Osborne claimed, everything about her life had been a pernicious confection and sham. It's true also that she dished out many vicious insults of her own directed towards her husband; publicly mocking his impotence and deriding him as a closeted homosexual, for example. 
 
But, even if all's fair in love and war, you don't need to speak spitefully of the dead and show open contempt for a woman who has taken her own life; describing her suicide, for example, as a tawdry piece of theatricality, if "one of the few original or spontaneous gestures in her loveless life" [2].
 
Nor do you need to add that your only regret is not being able to look upon her open coffin and shit upon the corpse. This doesn't make you a transgressive author who should be celebrated for the brutal violence of their language. It just makes you a prick ...
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Bennett took an overdose of quinalbarbitone (or secobarbital as it is known in the United States).    
 
[2] John Osborne, Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography, (Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 259.  

Musical bonus: In 1992, Bennett's ashes - along with those of her friend, the actress Rachel Roberts (who also died by suicide, in 1980) - were scattered by the film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson on the River Thames, while musician Alan Price sang the Leiber and Stoller song Is That All There Is? 
      Footage of the event was included in Anderson's autobiographical BBC documentary also entitled Is That All There Is? (1992): click here to watch on YouTube.


6 comments:

  1. Leaving aside the writer's puzzling basis for discrediting Osborne's considerable achievements in theatre as 'over-rated' with a sweep of his blogospherical hand, I'm not sure why Osborne's 'maligning' of Bennett is any more 'shameful' than her treatment of him, or, if one prefers, why the writer is being so gender-selective in his residual moralism. Don Paterson has a tongue-in-cheek aphorism about women being better than men, but the truth is neither are any better or worse than the other. (In case readers need to take a reality check here and redress the balance, see the superbly challenging stand-up of Bill Burr.) It's about time we started to wonder why 'toxic femininity' is not a thing in our over-femininised culture (note to perceptive readers - the answer's in the question). If the likes of Jordan Peterson had the courage to take that one step further in his sociocultural criticism, we might be getting into that politically locked-up Pandora's box a bit quicker.
    Osborne was a complex, brilliant, innovative, lionised and himself maligned theatrical talent, whose genius was, to put it mildly, to divide audiences and critics alike. The imbrications of his later alcohol-lubricated self-loathing (and Bennett's considerable part in same) have been traumatically drawn out in a superb article by John Heilpern, which makes clear their inseparability from the playwright's artistic self-perception: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2006/apr/29/theatre.biography.
    Readers may also care to reflect on the enormous loyalty Osborne inspired from friends and playwrights like David Hare, as well as brave, gutsy and convention-flouting actresses like Vanessa Redgrave - see Hare's superbly eloquent memoir piece here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jun/08/hayfestival2002.artsfeatures. In some ways, perhaps, Osborne was to the stage what Lars von Trier is to film in our own time - an artist-deviant for his refusal of disguise, an 'enfant terrible' whose adult transparency in a world of inauthentic, overgrown children separated the minority wheat (those who understand and take seriously Blake's dictum that 'the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom') from all those resentful little Englanders who couldn't bear his theatrical excesses. As the Royal Court director Lindsay Anderson put it, 'The English hate energy'.
    As for Osborne's bitterly loving epitaph to the dead Bennett, it mostly illustrates to me the eloquence of his ‘tender contempt’ to the end, or, if one prefers, his Wildean capacity to elevate amorous bile to literary unforgettability. (What he said was he wished he could 'look down upon her open coffin and, like that bird in the Book of Tobit, drop a good, large mess in her eye'). I'd say that shows he was a stylist to the end, refused the Christian/conformist traps of forgiveness, and reminded us all that hate is just a special form of love - arguably, the highest, if cruellest, kind.

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    1. Thanks for these remarks from the manosphere, an unforgiving realm in which angry, abusive behaviour is the norm and hate is the highest form of love ... See the following post for a longer response: http://torpedotheark.blogspot.com/2021/07/a-brief-history-of-angry-young-men-and.html?m=1

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    2. Simon Solomon you are quite obviously a sad and tired man. Go find yourself a Trump rally, you’ll fit right in.

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    3. Let people (simon solomon) have thier opinion and stop ripping on trump. Highly unoriginal. Why the hell are you even here.

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  2. Also, I would have thought that suicide can indeed be an act of spectacular theatricality, as Sylvia Plath's late poem 'Edge' before she gassed herself darkly evokes. As an actress (or professional sham artist), Bennett would have surely known this better than most.

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    1. I’m sure you are universally beloved of all the females you’ve ever encountered.

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