The Million Dollar Mermaid by Esther Williams

Now, for the hundreds of thousands of people who read and loved both of Niven's books, comes Esther Williams's wonderfully witty, fresh, and frank autobiography, all about an eighteen-year-old girl who reluctantly answers the siren call of MGM - at the time, the most powerful and prestigious movie studio in the world - and who soon finds herself launched on a career that will last more than twenty years, during which time she will help to create a genre of film that seems almost unimaginable today, yet which still holds all its original freshness and fascination, and who becomes during those years one of the world's top box office stars. “But that whole thing actually happened on Lot 3 at MGM-they owned a space that had a lake in it.Not since David Niven wrote the bestselling The Moon's a Balloon and its sequel Bring on the Empty Horses has one of Hollywood's great stars written with such genuine wit and candor about * what it was like to work in the movie factories where actors were pampered and coddled, yet expected to work without complaint for long, hard hours * what it was like to be young and sexy and to be turned into an object of desire for millions of moviegoers * what it was like to live in a world of almost total unreality, yet be expected to go about the business of finding a mate and raising a family, and avoiding personal scandal at all costs. “There’s the moment in the movie when I take the braces off, and go swimming in a lake before Walter Pidgeon starts yelling for me,” recalls Corcoran, who declined to reveal her current age. Corcoran, eight years old at the time, played the younger version of Kellerman in the first 20 minutes of the film. Williams starred in the film as Annette Kellerman, the real-life Australian swimmer who overcame a childhood bout of polio to achieve fame as a champion swimmer, Hollywood film sensation, and pioneer of the modern one-piece swimsuit in the early 1900s. “The studio brought me to the Hollywood Athletic Club for lessons. “MGM had to teach me how to swim for the movie,” Corcoran says with a laugh over the phone from her home in California’s San Fernando Valley. In a particularly captivating scene, one of the most mesmerizing of her career, the brunette beauty slides into a turquoise pool amid billowing plumes of yellow and red smoke before being hoisted above a kaleidoscopic formation of synchronized swimmers.īut it’s not the high dives or choreographed underwater sequences that Donna Corcoran, one of the films’ last surviving cast members, most eagerly remembers.

Million Dollar Mermaid was the 1952 blockbuster that cemented swimmer and aqua-musical star Esther Williams as a Hollywood luminary.

The Million Dollar Mermaid by Esther Williams