Buxom icon was star before first film

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This article was published 01/03/2011 (5717 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By John Rogers

LOS ANGELES — Jane Russell, the busty brunette who shot to fame as the sexy star of Howard Hughes’ 1941 western The Outlaw, died Monday of respiratory failure, her family said. She was 89.

Although Russell largely retired from Hollywood after her final film, 1970’s Darker Than Amber, she had remained active in her church, with charitable organizations and with a local singing group until her health began to decline just a couple weeks ago, said her daughter-in-law, Etta Waterfield. She died at her home in Santa Maria.

“She always said, ‘I’m going to die in the saddle, I’m not going to sit at home and become an old woman,’ ” Waterfield told The Associated Press. “And that’s exactly what she did, she died in the saddle.”

Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, put her onto the path to stardom when he cast her in The Outlaw, a film he fought for with censors for nearly a decade to get into wide release.

With her sultry look and glowing sexuality, Russell became a star before she was ever seen by a wide movie audience. The Hughes publicity mill ground out photos of the beauty in low-cut costumes and swimsuits, and she became famous, especially as a pinup for Second World War GIs.

Then in 1948 she starred opposite Bob Hope in the box-office hit, The Paleface, a comedy-western in which Russell was tough-but-sexy Calamity Jane to Hope’s cowardly dentist.

Although her look and her hourglass figure made her the subject of numerous nightclub jokes, unlike Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth and other pinup queens of the era, Russell was untouched by scandal in her personal life. During her Hollywood career she was married to star UCLA and pro football quarterback Bob Waterfield.

The Outlaw, although it established her reputation, was beset with trouble from the beginning. Director Howard Hawks, one of Hollywood’s most eminent and autocratic filmmakers, rankled under producer Hughes’ constant suggestions and finally walked out.

“Hughes directed the whole picture — for nine bloody months!” Russell said in 1999.

The film’s rambling, fictional plot featured Russell as a friend of Billy the Kid as he tussles with Doc Holliday and Sheriff Pat Garrett.

It had scattered brief runs in the 1940s, earning scathing reviews. The Los Angeles Times called it “one of the weirdest Western pictures that ever unreeled before the public.”

But Hughes made sure no one overlooked his No. 1 star. The designer of the famous “Spruce Goose” airplane used his engineering skills to make Russell a special bra (which she said she never wore) and he bought the ailing RKO film studio to turn it into a vehicle for her.

Wisely, he also loaned her to Paramount to make The Paleface, because at RKO she starred in a series of potboilers such as His Kind of Woman (with Robert Mitchum), Double Dynamite (Frank Sinatra, Groucho Marx), The Las Vegas Story (Victor Mature) and Macao (Mitchum again).

Hughes had rewarded her with a unique 20-year contract paying $1,000 a week, then he sold RKO and quit making movies. Russell continued receiving the weekly fee, but never made another film for Hughes.

Her only other notable film was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a 1953 musical based on the novel by Anita Loos. She and Monroe teamed up to sing Two Little Girls From Little Rock and seek romance in Paris.

At a 2001 film festival appearance, Russell noted Monroe was five years younger, saying, “It was like working with a little sister.”

She followed that up with the 1954 musical The French Line, which like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had her cavorting on an ocean liner. The film was shot in 3-D, and the promotional campaign for it proclaimed “J.R. in 3-D. Need we say more?”

In 1955, she made the sequel Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (without Monroe) and starred in the Westerns The Tall Men, with Clark Gable, and Foxfire, with Jeff Chandler. But by the 1960s, her film career had faded.

“Why did I quit movies?” she remarked in 1999. “Because I was getting too old! You couldn’t go on acting in those years if you were an actress over 30.”

She was born Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell on June 21, 1921, in Bemidji, Minn., and the family later moved to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Her mother was a lay preacher, and she encouraged the family to build a chapel in their back yard.

Despite her mother’s Christian preachings, young Jane had a wild side. She wrote in her 1985 autobiography, “My Paths and Detours,” that during high school she had a back-alley abortion, which may have rendered her unable to bear children.

 

— The Associated Press