Critic James Agee famously said that Esther Williams, when slithering wetly through the musicals built around her formidable swimming skills, suggested a "porpoise amused by its own sex appeal." A reluctant movie star who had been a champion swimmer at 15, Williams was born in Los Angeles and spotted by an MGM talent scout while performing with Billy Rose's Aquacade. She took to the camera like -- well, a porpoise to water, displaying a likeably unpretentious personality, a pleasant singing voice and a witty way with a comedy line. But it was in the water that she came into her exhilarating own, creating graceful water ballets and performing daredevil stunts with cheerful bravado.

After a quick apprenticeship in an Andy Hardy film and the Spencer Tracy/Irene Dunne vehicle A Guy Named Joe (1943), Williams made her first swim-musical, Bathing Beauty, in 1944, effortlessly upstaging Red Skelton in what had been originally envisioned as a comedy vehicle for him. The movie was a hit and led to a series of musicals filmed in luscious color with many opportunities for Williams to strut her stuff in form-fitting swimsuits.

Van Johnson became Williams' favored leading man, matching his all-American charm to Esther's own in Thrill of a Romance (1945), Easy to Wed (1946), Duchess of Idaho (1950) and Easy to Love (1953). In the latter film, a climactic sequence staged by Busby Berkeley at Cypress Gardens has Williams, a neophyte water-skier, fearlessly leading a platoon of other skiers in spectacular -- and dangerous -- formations.

Although frustrated working with the autocratic Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen on Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949), Williams put her own stamp on two bouncy musicals: Skirts Ahoy! (1952), in which she plays a WAVE recruit; and Dangerous When Wet (1953), in which she's an English-channel swimmer who falls for Fernando Lamas (her husband-to-be in real life). She had some of her best comic moments in her final MGM movie, Jupiter's Darling (1955), based on the Robert E. Sherwood play The Road to Rome. In that one, Williams plays a temptress who tries to prevent Hannibal (Howard Keel) from conquering Rome.

But Williams' signature film at MGM was Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), in which she played her forerunner in swim-spectacle stardom, Australian Annette Kellerman. Berkeley again handled the swimming sequences, and they stand out as Williams' most colorful and elaborate. Her more serious moments in this film biography indicated that Williams might have a future as a straight dramatic actress. But audiences failed to support her in such melodramas as Universal's The Unguarded Moment (1956) and Raw Wind in Eden (1958), and she retired from films in the early 1960s. Ever the dynamic businesswoman, Williams has succeeded in her ventures into swimming pool and swimwear lines. Still vibrant in her 80s, she announced plans to co-produce a water-based spectacle called Aquaria at Bally's Las Vegas in 2005. She also made a special appearance at the TCM Classic Film Festival in 2010.

by Roger Fristoe