Obituary: Betty Hutton

Betty Hutton was given the nickname the "blonde bombshell"

It was the 1950 movie Annie Get Your Gun, Irving Berlin's musical biography of Wild West sharpshooter Annie Oakley, which made Betty Hutton a star.

Her story reads like a Hollywood script itself - child star, success, substance abuse, failed marriages and redemption.

She was born Elizabeth June Thornburg in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1921. She never knew her father, and began singing, at the age of five, in her alcoholic mother's illegal "speakeasy" during Prohibition.

After singing in several bands in Detroit, where her family had moved following troubles with the police, she got her break with the Vincent Lopez Band - it was the bandleader who gave her the name Hutton.

There followed success on Broadway with musicals like Two for the Show and Panama Hattie.

With her "blonde bombshell" looks and her energetic, though insecure, personality, Paramount cast her in several movies such as The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, a satire which troubled the censors with the story of a young woman who gets pregnant after a spur-of-the-moment marriage, and who can't remember the name of the father.

Hutton's movie career ended abruptly

Biopics became something of a speciality too. She played the legendary nightclub queen Texas Guinan in Incendiary Blonde in 1945, and the silent-screen star Pearl White in the 1947's Perils of Pauline.

It was because Judy Garland had to drop out of the filming of Annie Get Your Gun through illness, that MGM gave Betty Hutton her big break. The 1950 movie made Hutton a star.

Time magazine wrote of her that year: "Watching her in action has some of the fascination of waiting for a wildly sputtering fuse to touch off an alarmingly large firecracker."

Like her closest musical rival, Judy Garland, Hutton had earned a reputation as a difficult person to work with.

Decline

She starred in the circus epic, The Greatest Show on Earth, performing her own trapeze stunts under Cecil B DeMille's direction.

But her Hollywood career came to an abrupt halt when she walked out on her contract just two years later, reportedly in a dispute over her demand that her then-husband direct her films.

She made only one film after that but had a TV series for a year and worked occasionally on the stage and in nightclubs.

"When I'm working with jerks with no talent, I raise hell until I get what I want," she once said.

One of Hutton's final TV appearances was in 2000

After appearances on radio, television and stage petered out, she sank into periods of drug abuse and alcoholism.

In 1967, she was contracted to star in two westerns for Paramount, but she was fired shortly after the projects were begun. She had a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide.

Several years later, she was discovered working as a housekeeper to a priest in Rhode Island. She converted to Roman Catholicism and, in 1986, gained a liberal arts degree.

She gave occasional performances and interviews in recent years, once saying of showbusiness: "It's a nightmare out there. It hurts what we do in our private lives."

Betty Hutton had four failed marriages but was eventually reunited with her three estranged daughters. Later, she lived out a quiet retirement in California.