[6] Bennett was a child actor, appearing in Max Reinhart's production of The Miracle at Olympia Theatre in 1911.
He continued to appear in stage in productions of The Speckled Band (1916), King Lear (1916) with Sir Herbert Tree and Raffles (1917).
During this time, while acting in the evenings he wrote his first three full-length plays: The Return, based on his war service, Blackmail and The Last Hour.
In December 1926 Bennett played Theseus in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at London's Winter Garden Theatre.
In April 1927 he was in a production of Othello at the Apollo Theatre alongside John Gielgud, Robert Loraine and Gertrude Elliott.
Bennett had the biggest success of his career to date when Al Woods decided to finance a production of Blackmail in 1928, produced by Raymond Massey and starring Tallulah Bankhead.
[10] Bennett's fourth play was The Danger Line (1929), based on Hazel May Marshall's story Ten Minutes to Twelve.
While at BIP he wrote stories for as yet filmed books: Death on the Footplate, The Parrot Whistles, High Speed, Love My Dog and Fireman Save My Child.
Bennett wrote Mannequin (1933); The House of Trent (1933); Matinee Idol (1933) for King; Hawley's of High Street (1933), a rare comedy for Bennett; The Secret of the Loch (1934), the first film shot on location in Scotland; Warn London (1934); an adaptation of his play Big Business (1934); and Gay Love (1934).
Hitchcock moved over to Gaumont British where he got Michael Balcon interested in Bulldog Drummond's Baby.
He wrote The Clairvoyant (1935) with Claude Rains and Fay Wray; King of the Damned (1935), written with Sidney Gilliat; All at Sea (1936); Blue Smoke (1935).
[16] In January 1936 his play Page From a Diary, starring Greer Garson and Ernst Deutsch, had a short run at the Garrick Theatre in London.
[18][19] Bennett's work with Hitchcock had made him perhaps the most highly regarded screenwriter in England (one paper called him "Britain's best known blood curdler"[20]) and attracted the attention of Hollywood.
Bennett got his first Hollywood credited on the comedy The Young in Heart (1938); he did the construction and Paul Osborne the dialogue.
Bennett then signed a contract to MGM where he worked on Cause for Alarm, an adaptation of an Eric Ambler novel which ended up not being made, and Balalaika (1939), a Nelson Eddy musical.
De Mille to work on the script construction of Reap the Wild Wind (1942), which was a huge hit.
[24] De Mille used Bennett again on The Story of Dr. Wassell (1944), once more focusing on construction while Alan Le May did the dialogue.
Olivier and Leigh pulled out of the Madeleine Smith project, so Bennett went to Universal to work on Ivy (1947), a thriller for Sam Wood and Joan Fontaine.
Instead he worked on the scripts for The Sign of the Ram (1948) for John Sturges and Black Magic (1948) for Edward Small.
He continued to write: the unproduced Bangkok for Robert G. North, The Search for the Holy Grail for De Mille and a film for Rank, The Moneyman.
[33] He then did a series of films for Allen: The Big Circus (1959), The Lost World (1960), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), and Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962).
He has also been the subject of biographical articles: He was interviewed by Arnold Schwartzman for the British Entertainment History Project in 1992.