Williams, Esther (1923—)

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Williams, Esther (1923—)

American actress and championship swimmer who became Hollywood's second "Million Dollar Mermaid." Born on August 8, 1923, in Inglewood, California; youngest of five children (three girls and two boys) of Lou Williams (a commercial artist) and Bula Williams (a schoolteacher); attended public schools in Los Angeles; graduated from Los Angeles City College; attended the University of Southern California; married Leonard Kovner (a physician, divorced); married Ben Gage (a radio announcer and singer), in 1945 (divorced); married Fernando Lamas (an actor), in 1967 (died 1982); married Edward Bell (a former professor and sometime actor); children: (second marriage) sons Benjamin and Kimball, and daughter Susan Gage .

Selected filmography:

Andy Hardy's Double Life (1942); A Guy Named Joe (1943); Bathing Beauty (1944); Thrill of a Romance (1945); Ziegfeld Follies (1946); The Hoodlum Saint (1946); Easy to Wed (1946); Till the Clouds Roll By (cameo, 1947); Fiesta (1947); This Time for Keeps (1947); On an Island With You (1948); Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949); Neptune's Daughter (1948); Duchess of Idaho

(1950); Pagan Love Song (1950); Callaway Went Thataway (unbilled cameo, 1951); Texas Carnival (1951); Skirts Ahoy! (1952); Million Dollar Mermaid (1952); Dangerous When Wet (1953); Easy to Love (1953); Jupiter's Darling (1955); The Unguarded Moment (1956); Raw Wind in Eden (1958); The Big Show (1961); The Magic Fountain (Sp., 1961).

A championship swimmer turned professional, Esther Williams emerged as "Hollywood's Mermaid" during the 1950s, starring in a string of lavishly mounted Technicolor aqua-musicals. When big-budget musicals went out of fashion in the 1960s, however, her movie career came to a halt. Having already invested her earnings in a number of business ventures, Williams gracefully left Hollywood behind.

Esther Williams was born in 1923 and raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood, the youngest of five children. She learned to swim at the municipal pool across the street from the Williams' home, earning free swimming time by dispensing and collecting locker-room towels. In her early teens, Williams began entering and winning swim meets and became a member of the prestigious Los Angeles Athletic Club. At age 17, she rose to national prominence by winning every race she entered at the 1939 Women's Outdoor Swimming Nationals (100-meter freestyle, 300-meter and 800-yard relays, and 100-meter breaststroke). Recruited for the 1940 Olympic team, she was on her way to Tokyo when World War II intervened and the summer Games were canceled.

In 1940, after briefly attending the University of Southern California and modeling for a Los Angeles department story, Williams auditioned for and won a starring role in Billy Rose's Aquacade at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. Paired with Olympian and screen star Johnny Weissmuller, she swam four shows a day (five on weekends) for eight months. When the show closed, she was offered a movie contract, but declined it believing that she couldn't act. However, a year later, when Louis B. Mayer offered her a contract which included six months of training, she accepted.

Williams' early film roles, in Andy Hardy's Double Life (1942) and A Guy Named Joe (1943), attracted some attention, but it was Hollywood's swimming movie Bathing Beauty (1944) that catapulted her to stardom. For the film, MGM constructed a special 90-foot square, 20-foot deep pool on the lot and outfitted it with hydraulic lifts, hidden air hoses, and special camera cranes for overhead shots. "No one had ever done a swimming movie before," Williams explained, "so we just made it up as we went along. I ad-libbed all my own underwater movements."

A series of aqua-musicals followed, among them Ziegfeld Follies (1944), On an Island With You (1948), Neptune's Daughter (1949), Pagan Love Song (1950), and Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), in which Williams portrayed Annette Kellerman , the famed Australian swimmer who popularized swimming, pioneered the one-piece bathing suit, and appeared in early films. (Williams won the Golden Globe Award for Million Dollar Mermaid, putting her in the ranks of the most popular female stars in the world.) The films, though thin on plot, were big on musical numbers and had at least one beautifully photographed underwater sequence in which Williams—surrounded by hundreds of shapely, synchronized swimmers—executed a water ballet, amid flames, fountains, and rolling fog.

At the height of her Hollywood career, Williams was one of the top moneymakers for MGM, and was as popular abroad as she was in America, particularly in India and the Middle East. Although never cited for her acting ability ("I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't act," she once cheerfully confessed), Williams was one of the few female athletes to successfully cross over to movies, and her career played a major role in popularizing competitive and synchronized swimming. Her last swimming pictures were Easy to Love (1953) and Jupiter's Darling (1955), after which the genre fell out of favor.

Williams had invested her movie earnings wisely, however, and by the time of her retirement, she had a number of successful business enterprises, including a swimming pool company, a restaurant, and a bathing suit deal with Fred Cole of California. Ultimately she developed her own Esther Williams Collection, targeting older women. "I got into business because I knew those musicals couldn't go on forever," she said, also admitting that when she started in films she told her bosses to hold her modeling job. "This movie-making thing wouldn't last. I mean, how many swimming movies could they make?"

Williams was married briefly to a young medical intern, Leonard Kovner. After they divorced, she married actor-producer Ben Gage, a union which produced three children: Benjamin, Kimball, and Susan. That marriage ended in divorce in 1957, after which Williams married actor Fernando Lamas, who died of cancer in 1982. He was apparently the love of her life, although she says he was so jealous that he would not allow her three children to live with them. The actress is currently married to Edward Bell, a former French literature professor and sometime actor. In a tell-all autobiography, Million Dollar Mermaid, written with Digby Diehl and published in 1999, Williams writes candidly about her career, her love affairs, and her first three marriages.