Freddie Bennett grew to adulthood at Portland, Oregon, the youngest of the ten children of William Portland Bennett and Alice Permilla Nelson. He appears in census records in 1920 as a resident of Port Orford, Curry County, Oregon, along with his brothers, Golden and Frank. During his brief life, Freddie was employed in various occupations including stenographer, clerk, and radio operator. In 1922 he moved to Los Angeles, California, and there, on December 3, 1924, married Alma Long, whose mother, Doris (nee McCrea), was the second wife of Freddie's eldest brother, Charlie Bennett. The couple had no children, and resided in Los Angeles, where Freddie succumbed to influenza and pneumonia at 30.

Between 1923 and 1931, during the "silent film" era, Alma Bennett was a motion picture actress in Hollywood, California. One newspaper columnist wrote in 1923 that Alma got her big break when she was hired to play a "bathing girl" in a movie directed by Mack Sennett. Since she was unable to swim, she spent three days prior to her first camera call practicing the breaststroke. Much of Alma's career in Hollywood was spent as a contract actor for Famous Players–Lasky Film Corporation, the forerunner of Paramount Pictures Corporation. Famous Players was the collaborative and highly-lucrative brainchild of legendary film director Adolph Zukor and his business partner, Jesse Louis Lasky Sr.

In all, Alma Bennett appeared in 64 films, mostly as seductive vamps in supporting roles. Among her most notable movies were: "The Face on the Bar-Room Floor" (1923), a drama directed by John Ford, of which no known prints have survived; "The Lost World" (1925), an early science fiction adventure based on Arthur Conan Doyle's famous novel of the same name; and "Long Pants" (1927), a Frank Capra-directed comedy, in which she played a big-city femme fatale. Alma's acting career came to an abrupt end with the advent of "talkies" in the early 1930s.

Alma Bennett remarried twice after Freddie's death: first, in 1929, to Harry J. Spingler (1889-1953), her business manager, agent, and fellow movie actor, and second, in 1954, to John Penman Whiteford (1889-1962), a longtime motion picture actor who was known as 'Blackie.' Alma died at 54 in such obscurity that her early contribution to the Hollywood motion picture industry went unmentioned in the press.