| Esther Jane Williams (born 8 August 1922) is a United States swimmer and movie star.
Esther Williams was born in Inglewood, California,
and was enthusistic about swimming from her youth. She qualified to be in the United States swim team in the 1940 Olympics, but the games were canceled due to World War II. Williams instead went to Hollywood, and quickly became a popular star of the 1940s and 1950s.
Many of her films, such as Million Dollar Mermaid and Jupiter's Darling, contained elaborately staged swimming scenes, obtained not
without physical cost to the performer. She broke her neck filming a 50-foot dive off a tower during a climactic musical number
for the 1952 release Million Dollar Mermaid which landed her in a body cast for six
months (she subsequently recovered though she still suffers headaches as a result of the accident). Her many hours spent
submerged resulted in her rupturing her eardrums numerous times. In her
autobiography, Williams details several other occasions in which she nearly drowned shooting her oxygen-defying stunts.
Her love life was a source of media interest. She was romantically linked with Jeff Chandler, and has been married four times. Her third husband was actor Fernando Lamas. Her brother, Stanton Williams, also had a brief
acting career during the 1920s before his death while still a teenager.
Esther Williams retired from acting in the early 1960s.
Filmography
- Personalities (1942) (short subject)
- Inflation (1942) (short subject)
- 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 (1946) (cameo)
- Fiesta (1947)
- This Time for
Keeps (1947)
- On an Island
with You (1948)
- Take Me Out to the Ball Game
(1949)
- Neptune's
Daughter (1949)
- Screen Actors (1950) (short
subject)
- Duchess of Idaho
(1950)
- Pagan Love Song
(1950)
- Texas Carnival (1951)
- Callaway Went
Thataway (1951) (cameo)
- Shirts Ahoy! (1952)
- Million Dollar
Mermaid (1952)
- Dangerous When Wet
(1953)
- Easy to Love (1953)
- 1955 Motion Picture Theatre Celebration (1955) (short subject)
- Jupiter's Darling
(1955)
- Screen Snapshots: Hollywood, City of Stars (1956) (short subject)
- The Unguarded
Moment (1956)
- Raw Wind in Eden
(1958)
- The Big Show (1961)
- The Magic Fountain
(1963)
- That's Entertainment! III (1994)
Further reading
- Williams, Esther, The Million Dollar Mermaid: An Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 1999.
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