Haley Loraine Keeling (born January 7, 1988), known professionally as Haley Bennett, is an American actress. She made her film debut in the romantic comedy Music and Lyrics (2007) and has since appeared in films such as The Equalizer (2014), The Magnificent Seven (2016), Hillbilly Elegy (2020), and Cyrano (2021).
Early life
Bennett was born Haley Loraine Keeling in Fort Myers, Florida, on January 7, 1988.[1] Her parents, Leilani (née Dorsey Bennett) and Ronald Keeling,[2][3] met in church and hitchhiked to Florida while Leilani was pregnant with her.[4] She is of English, German, Irish, Lithuanian, Scottish and African-American descent. She was raised in Naples, Florida.[2] Her parents divorced when she was six years old and she moved to Ohio with her father, who opened an automobile repair shop there.[4] They moved regularly around the state, with Bennett later saying, "There was no time when I lived anywhere longer than two years. I was always a social outcast. Maybe I didn't care what people thought because I [thought], 'Well, I probably won't stick around here for too long.'"[4] Bennett describes her childhood as "nomadic", as she moved between living with her father in Ohio and her mother in Florida:
I lived somewhat of a nomadic life even when I lived in Ohio. We spent time in rural areas, in suburban areas, never really city areas. We rode four-wheelers. We had pigs and ferrets. And creeks. We had a creek in my backyard. It was like Huckleberry Finn... I was kind of a tomboy for awhile. It's tough to explain because I grew up with my mom and my dad simultaneously but separately because they weren't together. So I kind of get femininity from my mother and boyishness from my dad. He loved fishing, he loves hunting, he loves boating, and football, baseball, and basketball. So that really saturated my life. And then my mother was very soft and also strong, but more of an artist. So I kind of had the best of both worlds.[5]
When Bennett was 10, she and her father moved to Stow, Ohio, where she attended Stow-Munroe Falls High School. At 13, she enrolled at Barbizon Modeling School in Akron, Ohio.[3] She attended the International Modeling and Talent Convention in 2001 and 2006, where she won a major award,[3] acted in school plays, and sang in choirs.[6] She also lived with her mother in Naples occasionally, where she attended Barron G. Collier High School, and studied music and acting.[7] When Bennett was 18, she persuaded her mother to take her to Los Angeles for three months to pursue an acting career. Just as she was about to return home, she managed to secure representation by claiming to her prospective agent that a highly regarded agency had approached her; the agent refused to lose Bennett and signed her.[4] She began using her mother's maiden name as her stage name.[6][8]
In what was only her third audition,[4] Bennett won the role of popstar Cora Corman for her film debut in the 2007 romantic comedy Music and Lyrics.[9] She sang several songs for the film's soundtrack, including "Buddha's Delight" and "Way Back into Love"; fragments of the songs "Entering Bootytown" and "Slam" are heard during concert scenes in the film, and her song "Invincible" plays during the end credits. That same year, she signed with 550 Music/NuSound Records (part Epic Records), and began working on her debut album, though one was never released. Bennett performed her first live concert at The Mint in Los Angeles on June 19, 2008. Despite the auspicious film debut, Bennett did not break through.[10]
After signing a three-picture deal with Warner Bros. (beginning with Music and Lyrics),[11] Bennett subsequently starred in her second and third films, the comedy College (2008)[12] and the supernatural horror The Haunting of Molly Hartley (2008).[13] Also in 2008, she made a cameo appearance in Marley & Me. The following year, Bennett had a lead role alongside Julia Stiles in Shekhar Kapur's short film Passage. She then co-starred as Julie Campbell in the horror thriller film The Hole, directed by Joe Dante.[14] In 2010, she appeared in the fantasy comedy Kaboom,[15] and the drama Arcadia Lost.[16] In July 2010, Bennett was cast in the FX crime-drama series Outlaw Country alongside Luke Grimes, Mary Steenburgen and John Hawkes.[17] The pilot was filmed in 2010 before a rewrite and reshoots in April 2011.[18] It remained in limbo until November 2011, when FX announced that it had not been picked up for a series.[19] The hour-and-a-half long pilot was broadcast as a TV film on August 24, 2012.[20]
She is in Eli Roth's Borderlands, an adaptation of the video game of the same name.[40] Bennett joined Whoopi Goldberg in drama film Till written and directed by Chinonye Chukwu.[41] She is starring in and producing the feature adaptation of Brood, a novel by Jackie Polzin.[42]
Personal life
In early 2017, Bennett began a relationship with then-married English film director Joe Wright, with Wright's wife at the time subsequently filing for divorce. She gave birth to her first and Wright's third child, a daughter, on December 27, 2018.[43][44][45] As of 2019, the family resides in Bruton, England.[46]
^ ab"Haley Bennett: Biography". AskMen. 2007. Archived from the original on August 27, 2017. Retrieved August 18, 2010. Haley Keeling was born in 1989 in Fort Myers, Florida, but she was raised in Naples, Florida and in Ohio.
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