Actress and champion swimmer Esther Williams, who showcased a combination of glamour and athleticism by starring in several spectacular and splashy MGM musicals of the 1940s, has died. She was 91.
Williams died peacefully in her sleep Thursday in Beverly Hills, family spokesman Harlan Boll announced.
Williams swam her way to stardom in such timeless motion pictures as Bathing Beauty, Neptune’s Daughter and Million Dollar Mermaid.
The audience response to the athletic All-American girl was phenomenal as MGM put Williams’ career into high gear. For more than a decade, she reigned in a new Hollywood genre created just for her: The Aqua Musical.
A special 90-foot square, 20-foot deep pool was built at Stage 30 on the MGM lot, complete with hydraulic lifts, hidden air hoses and special camera cranes for overhead shots. Over the years, MGM concocted dozens of pretenses for getting her in water, calling on the great Busby Berkeley to design some of the more lavish production numbers to show off Williams’ assets.
“No one had ever done a swimming movie before,” she once said, “so we just made it up as we went along. I ad-libbed all my own underwater movements.”
Bathing Beauty, which co-starred Basil Rathbone, was the most successful film of 1944. Especially notable are the spectacular sequences in Million Dollar Mermaid — complete with fountains, flames, and smoke and the Annette Kellerman story and Easy to Love, for which she learned to water-ski.
Throughout her illustrious film career, she swam more than 1,250 miles in 25 aqua-musicals for MGM and continually proved that she was a champion in the pool and at the box office. A champion, an American dream, her name is synonymous with swimming.
More to come.
Actress Esther Williams Dies at 91
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