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| March 13, 2007 |
| Betty Hutton, star of musicals, dead |
Betty Hutton, the actress and singer who brought a brassy vitality to Hollywood musicals such as "Annie Get Your Gun," has died in Palm Springs, California, at age 86.
The death was confirmed Monday by a friend of Hutton who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, citing Hutton's wishes that her death be announced at a specified time by the executor of her estate, Carl Bruno. The friend refused to provide further details including the time and cause of death.
"I can neither confirm or deny" the report, Bruno told The Associated Press from Palm Springs. "I'll be happy to talk about it tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon."
Hutton was at the top of the heap when she walked out of her Paramount contract in 1952, reportedly in a dispute over her demand that her then-husband direct her films. She made only one movie after that but had a TV series for a year and worked occasionally on the stage and in nightclubs.
Unlike other actresses who have been called "blonde bombshells," Hutton had a screen personality that had more to do with energy and humor than sex.
Time magazine wrote in 1950: "Betty Hutton, who is not remarkably pretty, by movie standards, nor a remarkably good singer or dancer, has a vividly unique personality in a town that tends to reduce beauty and talent to mass-produced patterns. Watching her in action has some of the fascination of waiting for a wildly sputtering fuse to touch off an alarmingly large firecracker."
It said she had "a bellicose zeal and a tomboyish winsomeness that suggested a cross between one of the Furies and Little Orphan Annie."
Hutton could be brash behind the camera, too, telling The Associated Press in 1954: "When I'm working with jerks with no talent, I raise hell until I get what I want."
Several of her films were biopics: "Incendiary Blonde," about actress and nightclub queen Texas Guinan; "Perils of Pauline," about silent-screen serial heroine Pearl White; and "Somebody Loves Me," about singer Blossom Seeley.
"Annie Get Your Gun" (1950) was the Irving Berlin musical biography of Annie Oakley, with Hutton playing the part Ethel Merman had made famous on Broadway. Hutton got the movie role part when Judy Garland dropped out of the production. |
posted by viraks @ 5:58:00 AM  |
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