Pulaski Times

Wrapping up our Women’s History Month series of prominent Arkansas women, we’re featuring actress Fran Bennett.

She was born in 1937 in Malvern. She earned a bachelor of science and master of arts degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and began working on her PhD. But she began studying voice under Scottish actress Kristin Linklater in 1963. Soon, Bennett found herself working as the voice and movement director for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. She worked and acted there for 12 years, and made her first television appearance (Guiding Light; Mrs. Matson) during that time.

In the late 1970s, her television career grew. From then into the 1980s, her credits include Diff’rent Stroke; Roots: The Next Generations; General Hospital; Dallas; Cagney and Lacey and more. Fans of Murder, She Wrote and The Bold and The Beautiful saw her on their screens. More recently, she appeared in Boston Legal, ER and Scandal, among others.

But theater remained her focus. For seven years she served as head of acting and director of performance at the CalArts School of Theater. She played the lead in King Lear at the Center for New Theater in Los Angeles and was a member of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company.

She taught at the London Academy of Dramatic art of was a master voice teacher with Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. She led voice workshops across the U.S., including at Fisk and Carnegie Mellon Universities.

She died in 2021 in Los Angeles.

(Photo from CalArts)

Original source can be found here.