Movies

LOS ANGELES – Betty Hutton, who played the brassy blonde in about two dozen movies, including the musical Annie Get Your Gun, has died, the executor of her estate said Tuesday. She was 86.

Betty Hutton

Ms. Hutton died in her Palm Springs apartment from complications of colon cancer Sunday night, but her death was not officially announced until after her funeral Tuesday, said Carl Bruno, the executor and a longtime friend.

"She wanted anonymity as far as being buried. She didn't want that to be turned into a circus," he said.

Ms. Hutton was at the top of the heap when she walked out of her Paramount contract in 1952, reportedly in a dispute over her demand that her then-husband direct her films. She made one movie after that but had a TV series for a year and worked occasionally on the stage and in nightclubs.

Annie Get Your Gun (1950) was the Irving Berlin musical biography of Annie Oakley, with Ms. Hutton playing the part Ethel Merman had made famous on Broadway. Ms. Hutton got the movie role when Judy Garland dropped out of the production.

Another notable film was The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, the 1944 Preston Sturges satire that rattled the censors with the story of a young woman who gets pregnant after a spur-of-the-moment marriage and can't quite remember who the father is.

In 1959-60 she starred in The Betty Hutton Show (also called Goldie), a TV series about a brash manicurist who suddenly inherits the estate of a wealthy customer and becomes guardian to his three children.

But her personal life was rocky at times, including four failed marriages, financial problems and difficulties between her and her three daughters. Her marriages to manufacturer Ted Briskin, dance director Charles O'Curran, recording company executive Alan Livingston and jazzman Pete Candoli ended in divorces.

The Associated Press