Annette Kellerman

Annette Marie Sarah Kellermann was born on 6 July 1886 in Marrickville, New South Wales, Australia, to Frederick William Kellermann, an Australian-born violinist, and his French wife, Alice Ellen Charbonnet, a pianist and music teacher. At age six, a weakness in her legs required her to wear steel braces, and her parents enrolled her in swimming classes at Cavill's Baths, a tidal pool in the North Sydney suburb of Lavender Bay, to help strengthen them. By thirteen her legs had largely recovered, and by fifteen she had mastered all swimming strokes and won her first competitive race, while also giving diving exhibitions.

In 1902, Kellermann claimed the ladies' 100 yards and mile championships of New South Wales, setting record times of 1 minute 22 seconds and 33 minutes 49 seconds respectively. That same year her family relocated to Melbourne, where she enrolled at Mentone Girls' Grammar School after her mother accepted a music teaching position there. During her school years she gave swimming and diving exhibitions at the main Melbourne baths, performed a mermaid act at Princes Court entertainment centre, and swam with fish in a glass tank at the Exhibition Aquarium. In June and July 1903 she performed high dives in the Coogee scene of Bland Holt's production The Breaking of the Drought at the Melbourne Theatre Royal.

On 24 August 1905, at age nineteen, Kellermann was among the first women to attempt a crossing of the English Channel. She made three unsuccessful attempts, later stating that she possessed the endurance but lacked the brute strength required to complete the crossing. She subsequently challenged and defeated Austrian Baroness Walburga von Isacescu, who had been the first woman to attempt a Channel crossing, in a race on the Danube.

Kellermann's Broadway career brought her to New York in 1911, when she appeared in the musical Undine, originating from Sydney, Australia. The production was an aquacade specialty conceived by composer Manuel Klein and performed in repertory with the popular musical Vera Violetta, which featured Al Jolson. Kellermann performed the title role. She returned to the New York Hippodrome in 1917 to perform a water ballet in a glass tank.

Her film career began with The Mermaid in 1911, in which she became the first actress to wear a swimmable mermaid costume on film. She designed her own mermaid swimming costumes and sometimes constructed them herself. The majority of her films centered on aquatic adventure, and she frequently performed her own stunts, including a dive of 92 feet into the sea and a 60-foot dive into a pool of crocodiles. In 1916, she starred in A Daughter of the Gods, produced by Fox Film Corporation as the first million-dollar film production, in which she became the first major actress to appear fully nude in a Hollywood production. She appeared in Queen of the Sea in 1918 and Venus of the South Seas in 1924, the latter a US and New Zealand co-production filmed partly in Prizma Color with one reel shot underwater. Venus of the South Seas was restored by the Library of Congress in 2004 and remains the only feature film starring Kellermann known to survive in complete form. Most of her other films are considered lost.

Kellermann was a prominent advocate for women's right to wear one-piece bathing costumes at a time when pantaloon combinations were the accepted standard. The popularity of her one-piece suits led her to establish her own line of women's swimwear, known as the Annette Kellermans. She also helped popularize synchronized swimming and authored a swimming manual. Her published works include How to Swim in 1918, Physical Beauty: How to Keep It in 1919, a children's story collection titled Fairy Tales of the South Seas in 1926, and numerous mail-order booklets on health, beauty, and fitness under the title The Body Beautiful. She also wrote an unpublished autobiography titled My Story.

In 1908, Harvard University's Dudley A. Sargent, following a study of 3,000 women, described Kellermann as the perfect woman based on the similarity of her physical proportions to the Venus de Milo. During her Fox film series she was frequently billed as Australia's Perfect Woman.

On or around 26 November 1912, Kellermann married her American-born manager, James Sullivan, in Danbury, Connecticut. A lifelong vegetarian, she later owned a health food store in Long Beach, California, and remained physically active well into old age. She and Sullivan returned to Australia in 1970, and in 1974 she was honored by the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Kellermann outlived her husband and died on 6 November 1975 in a hospital in Southport, Queensland, at the age of eighty-nine. She was cremated with Roman Catholic rites, and her remains were scattered over the Great Barrier Reef. She had no children.

Kellermann bequeathed her large collection of costumes and theatrical memorabilia to the Sydney Opera House, and many of her original costumes and personal items are held by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Her archive of personal papers is held in the Mitchell Collection at the State Library of New South Wales. Esther Williams portrayed Kellermann in the 1952 film Million Dollar Mermaid, and Kellermann's name appears on a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.