Posted on 06/06/2013 10:15:20 AM PDT by Borges
Wow ... my mother had a swimsuit that looked a lot like that. Blast from the past!
Absolutely!
He is her stepson.
By her own admission, she could not sing, dance or act, yet in the 1940s she was second only to Betty Grable as the world’s biggest female boxoffice draw. India named her its No 1 pin-up. What she did superlatively well was swim like an aquatic Fred Astaire and her studio, MGM, capitalised on this, turning her into a one-woman movie genre in her own right. As queen of the swimming musical she had no competition. Her only - distant - rival was the Olympic skater Sonja Henie, who carved out an equally improbable Hollywood career on the ice.
For MGM scriptwriters, the challenge was to keep Esther in the water as long as possible. Impossibly protracted underwater ballets - one in Dangerous When Wet (1953) seemingly in partnership with the cartoon characters Tom and Jerry - were written into the screenplays to defer the moment when she must step ashore and be herself. The truth, as comedienne Fanny Brice once bluntly put it, was that “Wet she’s a star; dry she ain’t”.
MGM always left the swimming scenes, which the star herself referred to as “the wet stuff”, until the end of shooting. Many of her male co-stars could not swim a stroke and, in case of accident, it was deemed prudent to ensure that “the dry stuff” was already in the can. If the actor drowned, the swimming scenes could always be covered by stand-ins or doubles.
In reality, however, Esther Williams often swam for her co-stars, using a one-armed back stroke that enabled her to support her weaker partners underwater with the other arm. In rare cases, MGM would build a platform beneath the surface so that the actor would appear to be swimming while in fact walking along the bottom of the pool. This device, however, was used only for “really sinkable men”.
LOL! I never heard that before.
I remember her as Jane in the Tarzan series. Johnny was another swimmer turned actor. It was the first thing that came to mind.
Yes she was married to Fernando Llamas for a long time. She was Lorenzo’s mom.
On a TMC promo there is a DYNAMITE shot of her in a one-piece, floating on her back with her palms behind her head. I always manage to be looking at the screen when that shot flashes by. RIP Esther.
“Elvis was a devout Christian.”
How do you define “devout Christian”? He talked a mean game but Elvis lived one hell of a degraded life. Albert Goldman argued that Elvis actually committed suicide when he learned that his “guys” were coming out with the tell-all book that was actually coincident with his death. We’re all sinners but “Evis” seemed to work a lot harder at it than most of our consciences would allow us to do.
Gosh the women of that era were so beautiful. I remember watching some of her movies with my folks. She had a nice long life.
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