Betty Luster

Betty Luster (April 27, 1922 – May 25, 2011) was an American actress, singer, and dancer whose performing career spanned the 1940s and 1950s across stage, television, and film. Though active on Broadway and in early television, she became most widely recognized in later decades for a role that had initially attracted little attention: her portrayal of the title character in the promotional short film Mr. B Natural.

Luster's earliest documented performing work took place in London in October 1938, when she appeared as a showgirl with the Dorchester Hale dance troupe. The following year she made a series of appearances on BBC television. Her Broadway debut came in 1940, when she performed as a dancing girl in Irving Berlin's Louisiana Purchase. Around 1946 or 1947 she worked as a chorus girl at the Beachcomber in Miami Beach, and in the late 1940s she performed on the operatic stage in Philadelphia. Prior to her professional career, Luster had won the first Miss Lake Mohawk contest in 1937.

Television became a significant part of her work in the early 1950s. In 1950 she served as co-hostess of the CBS game show Sing It Again, a program on which contestants attempted to identify songs from only a few notes and which is considered a forerunner of Name That Tune. The following year she was a regular on the NBC variety program Seven at Eleven, which aired in 1951. Luster returned to Broadway in 1955, playing the role of Sebena in The Wayward Saint, which ran at the Cort Theatre from February 17 to March 6 of that year.

In 1956, Luster filmed Mr. B Natural in Chicago, taking the title role in a short sponsored by musical instrument manufacturer C.G. Conn. The film was designed to encourage schoolchildren to take up music and centered on a "hep pixie" character who guides a junior high school student named Buzz Turner toward discovering the spirit of music through learning to play a Conn trumpet. The short circulated as a classroom reel for years with little notice. In 1991, it was brought to the attention of HBO while the network was seeking content for Comedy Central, and was subsequently licensed to Best Brains for use on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The episode aired nationally on November 30, 1991, paired with the feature War of the Colossal Beast, and the exposure transformed both the short and the Mr. B Natural character into recognized kitsch icons.

Following the filming of Mr. B Natural, Luster joined the production staff of CBS-TV's Name That Tune in a non-performing capacity in 1957. That same year, in August and September, she performed alongside Groucho Marx in the play Time for Elizabeth at the Andover Grist Mill Playhouse in New Jersey and subsequently in Iverton, Connecticut. After her marriage to Edmund Astley Prentis III, born in New York City on September 12, 1923, and who died in Delray, Florida on August 11, 1997, Luster retired from performing and joined her husband in pursuing big-game fishing, big-game hunting, and world-class croquet. Betty Luster died on May 25, 2011.