Betty Grable

Betty Grable, born Elizabeth Ruth Grable on December 18, 1916, in St. Louis, Missouri, was an American actress, dancer, singer, and model whose Broadway career spanned from 1939 to 1965. The youngest of three children born to Lillian Rose Grable and John Conn Grable, a stockbroker, she grew up alongside siblings Marjorie and John Karl. Her second cousin was silent-film actress Virginia Pearson. Pushed toward performance by her mother from an early age, Grable entered numerous beauty contests as a child, winning many, though she privately struggled with a fear of crowds and somnambulism.

In 1929, at age twelve, Grable traveled with her mother to Hollywood, where she enrolled at the Hollywood Professional School and the Ernest Blecher Academy of Dance. Her mother misrepresented her age to casting agents, claiming she was fifteen. That year Grable made an uncredited debut as a chorus girl in the Fox Studios revue Happy Days, which led to additional chorus roles in Let's Go Places and New Movietone Follies of 1930. In 1930, working under the pseudonym Frances Dean, she became one of the original Goldwyn Girls alongside Ann Sothern, Virginia Bruce, Claire Dodd, and Paulette Goddard, appearing in small parts including the Eddie Cantor hit Whoopee. She subsequently signed with RKO Radio Pictures in 1932, attending the studio's drama school and receiving her first credited screen role in Probation. Larger parts followed in The Gay Divorcee and Follow the Fleet before she moved to Paramount Pictures, which cast her in a series of college-themed films including This Way Please and College Swing.

When Paramount released Grable from her contract after the underperformance of Million Dollar Legs, she accepted producer Buddy DeSylva's offer to appear on Broadway in the musical Du Barry Was a Lady, starring alongside Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr. The 1939 production was an immediate critical and popular success and established Grable as a stage star. Her performance drew the attention of Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox, who signed her to a long-term contract. When Alice Faye had to withdraw from the Technicolor musical Down Argentine Way due to illness, Zanuck cast Grable as her replacement. The film, which co-starred Don Ameche and Carmen Miranda, was a box-office and critical success, and many observers identified Grable as Faye's successor at the studio.

Throughout the 1940s, Fox featured Grable in a succession of Technicolor musicals opposite leading men including Victor Mature, Don Ameche, John Payne, and Tyrone Power. Her forty-two films during the 1930s and 1940s collectively grossed more than one hundred million dollars. In 1943 she ranked as the number-one box-office draw in the world, and for ten consecutive years, from 1942 through 1951, she appeared among the Quigley Poll's top ten box-office stars. Two of her most commercially successful films were the musical Mother Wore Tights in 1947 and the comedy How to Marry a Millionaire in 1953. The U.S. Treasury Department identified her as the highest-salaried American woman in both 1946 and 1947, and her total career earnings exceeded three million dollars.

During World War II, a bathing-suit photograph of Grable became the most widely distributed pin-up image among American troops, surpassing that of Rita Hayworth. The photograph was later included in Life magazine's project documenting one hundred photographs that changed the world. Fox insured her legs for one million dollars as a publicity measure, and hosiery specialists of the era frequently cited the proportions of her legs as exemplary. Grable withdrew from her Fox contract in 1955 and retired from film acting, but she continued working in stage and television. She returned to Broadway, where her credits include the musical Hello, Dolly. Grable died on July 2, 1973.