Having been an English and theatre major in college, Carol Bennett found herself at an employment agency when she graduated. The agency sent her to a library job in the reference department at the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University in New Orleans. Her boss had traveled extensively working with U.S. Army Libraries and encouraged her to get a degree and do the same. Ms. Bennett subsequently traveled to Germany with the U.S. Army, where she was responsible for several military libraries.
Ms. Bennett holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and a Bachelor of Library Science from McGill University in Montreal, obtained in 1960 and 1962, respectively. From 1962 to 1964, she resided in Germany. From 1964 to 1976, she served as a librarian at various locations in the United States including the Princeton Public Library in Princeton, New Jersey. Soon after moving with her husband and children to the Washington, DC, area, Ms. Bennett became a reporter for the Alabama Radio Network from 1981 to when she retired in 2001. She was also a Washington correspondent for the weekly Washington-Alabama News Report.
Alongside her primary career, Ms. Bennett was an actress. In Summer Stock at the Weathervane Theater in Whitefield, New Hampshire, she played Blanche Dubois in “A Streetcar Named Desire” while appearing in five other plays, including “40 Carats,” in which she had the lead. In 1978, she was the girl in “There’s a Girl in My Soup” at the Garland Dinner Theatre in Columbia, Maryland. She appeared in the films “Kennedy” and “Prime Risk,” and was a non-speaking Supreme Court justice in the Netflix series “House of Cards.” She hosted the television series “Modern Maturity” on PBS from 1986 to 1988. In 2006, with syndicated travel writer Terese Kreuzer, Ms. Bennett co-authored “How to Move to Canada: A Primer for Americans.”
Ms. Bennett maintains affiliation with the American Association of University Women, the Older Women’s League, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). She is a member of the National Press Club’s history committee and has done interviews for the Library of Congress’s folk life department documenting the work lives of contemporary reporters. She is married to architect Ralph Bennett, and they have two children and three grandchildren.