The Olympic-calibre swimmer who became MGM's most profitable female star of the late 1940s — not because Hollywood made her a swimmer, but because she made Hollywood understand that swimming, done at her level, was an art form the screen had never tried to capture.
Portrait · Esther Williams
Born Esther Jane Williams on August 8, 1921, in Inglewood, California — the youngest of five children. She began competitive swimming at fifteen and by seventeen had qualified for the 1940 U.S. Olympic team in three events. The Helsinki Games of 1940 were cancelled by the Second World War; the medal she would almost certainly have won was replaced instead by a film career that generated more revenue for MGM than any other female star of the period.
Billy Rose's Aquacade touring show hired her in 1939; MGM spotted her there and signed her in 1941. Her screen debut in Andy Hardy's Double Life (1942) was unremarkable; her first aquatic musical, Bathing Beauty (1944), invented a genre. The formula — comedy and romance on land, spectacular synchronized swimming sequences in the water — was repeated across a decade of films that filled MGM's coffers and established Williams as the studio's most reliable profit centre.
What the formula obscured was the athletic achievement: Williams was performing underwater sequences of extraordinary technical difficulty, often with her eyes open in chemically treated pool water, in elaborate costumes and under filming conditions that her directors and cinematographers consistently acknowledged were beyond anything they had encountered in conventional film production. She developed much of the underwater cinematography technique herself.
Her finest film, Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), gave her the role of Australian swimming champion Annette Kellerman and the opportunity to demonstrate the full spectacular range of what she could do in water. She died on June 6, 2013, aged ninety-one, as the last surviving major star of the Aqua Musical era she had created.
The Busby Berkeley water sequences in Million Dollar Mermaid are among the most technically complex things ever filmed at MGM — Williams performing in a pool fifty feet in the air above a glass tank, through which cameras photographed her from below, in elaborate formation with dozens of other swimmers. She sustained an injury on set that required a neck brace for months; she completed the film anyway.
The plot is a container for the swimming sequences, and Williams knew it — she worked with the cinematographers and choreographers on the underwater sequences in ways that went considerably beyond what an actress was typically asked to contribute. The final swimming spectacular was unlike anything American cinema had attempted and established the template for a decade of imitators.
Shooting in Hawaii gave Williams the opportunity to perform in open ocean — a different and more dangerous proposition than the MGM pool — and she did so with the same technical confidence she brought to the studio work. The underwater photography, which she helped develop, was the most advanced in Hollywood at the time.
Easy to Love's final sequence — Williams performing on water skis, surrounded by hundreds of ski performers, under fireworks — pushed the Aqua Musical to its logical extreme of spectacle. It was the genre at its most extravagant, and Williams at her most athletically demanding, performing choreography that required weeks of rehearsal and nerves she described as the most tested of her career.
I was the girl in the water. I was never just an actress who swam. I was a swimmer who acted — and there's a very big difference.
Esther Williams' legacy is the invention of a cinematic form that existed entirely because she existed — and the demonstration that athletic excellence and screen presence are not merely compatible but, in the right circumstances, the same quality expressed in different media. The aquatic musical died with her career at MGM because there was no one else who could do what she had been doing.
The Olympic medals she never won — taken from her by a war that cancelled the 1940 Helsinki Games — were replaced by something arguably more lasting: a body of work that proved swimming, at the highest level, was as worthy of cinematic attention as any other human physical achievement. She is the only athlete in film history who created a genre specifically suited to her abilities and sustained it for a decade.