Esther Williams @ 100: Million Dollar Mermaid

Team Experience has been celebrating Esther Williams Centennial with a three part miniseries. Previously we featured Thrill of a Romance and Neptune's Daughter. 

by Cláudio Alves

In some ways, Million Dollar Mermaid is both the quintessential Esther Williams movie and a departure in the screen siren's career. During the 1940s, Williams achieved cinematic stardom through self-knowing exercises in romantic silliness and musical extravagance, lighthearted productions that wore their escapist possibilities as a badge of honor. One can often feel the screenwriter's strain, trying to shoe-horn swimming scenes in stories that could function just as well without them. Even the baseball comedy Take Me Out to the Ball Game had to be retrofitted into having an out-of-place pool number where Williams gets to lip-sync while swimming under the gaze of Busby Berkeley's camera. Consequentially, MGM never presented Williams as a great dramatic actress, preferring to exhalt her natural charms, radiant presence, and aquatic athleticism.

Loosely inspired in the life of Australian professional swimmer, vaudevillian, and early movie star Annette Kellerman, Million Dollar Mermaid is a lavish biopic with inspirational aspirations...

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Esther Williams @ 100: Neptune's Daughter

by Camila Henriques

As we continue with our celebration of Esther Williams's centennial, we're thrown into the story of "a girl, a guy and a swimsuit". All in all, that's an accurate summary of Neptune's Daughter, the 1949 film directed by Edward Buzell that paired the star with one of her frequent onscreen partners Ricardo Montalbán. Like other Williams efforts, the picture relies on her screen charisma to succeed, and, when it does it's pure magic.

It's a funny coincidence that her centennial comes as we're invaded by the Olympic spirit. Williams herself was never able to compete in the games. Her big shot came the year they were cancelled due to World War II, in 1940...

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Esther Williams @ 100: "Thrill of a Romance"

Team Experience is celebrating Esther Williams' Centennial.

by Nathaniel R

"Do you mind if I watch, too?" a businessman in a parked car shouts from outside a swimming pool -- a pretty swimming instructor, has asked her students to watch her do a swan dive. "Not at all," she says with a dulcet tone and flirty smile. Moments later the businessman is grilling the child to tell him everything he knows about his teacher including where she lives (!) This is the opening scene from 1945's Thrill of a Romance and courtship was, um, different. Who knows about this fictional swimming instructor but the actress playing her was already used to being gawked at, even before movie cameras arrived.

Esther Williams, the athlete turned movie star, was born on this day one hundred years ago in Inglewood, California. By the time she was 16 she was a national swimming champion with Olympic dreams. A couple of years later she was a star in the Aquacade (paired with another swimming champion, Johnny Weismuller, already a movie star). MGM signed her in 1941 and she became a popular WW II pin-up girl in her endless swimsuit photos. Meanwhile the movies back home were making her yet more famous. 

Which brings us to Thrill of a Romance (1945)...

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Beauty Break: Olympic Actors

As Google reminds us today is the anniversary of the very first Olympic games way back in 1896. What better time than now then for a beauty break featuring actors (this is the Film Experience after all) with Olympic history. Know this going in: Hollywood was OBSESSED with swimmers for a long time.

Let's kick it off with the original Flash Gordon Buster Crabbe. Here are eight Olympic Beauties with acting careers after the jump...

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