Jane Russell Has Died
Bill Anderson
Actress Jane Russell, who became a star with the 1943 release of "The
Outlaw," Howard Hughes' challenge to the Hollywood production code, has
died. She was 89.
Russell went on to play Calamity Jane opposite Bob Hope in "The
Paleface" (1948), and she starred with Marilyn Monroe in the 1953
musical "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes."
As former Times staff writer Claudia Luther explains in her obituary of
the actress, "Russell's provocative performance in 'The Outlaw' — and
the studio publicity shots posing her in a low-cut blouse reclined on a
stack of hay bales — marked a turning point in moviedom sexuality. She
became a bona fide star and a favorite pinup girl of soldiers during
World War II. Troops in Korea named two embattled hills in her honor. ...
"Meanwhile, Hughes brilliantly publicized the film, issuing
Russell-in-the-haystack posters with such lines as 'How Would You Like
to Tussle With Russell?' and 'Mean! Moody! Magnificent!' In one
publicity stunt, askywriter wrote 'The Outlaw' in the sky and then
carefully drew two circles with a dot in the center of each."
Some readers will remember Russell as a pitchwoman for Playtex bras, for
"full-figured women."
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Bill Anderson
I am the Mighty Favog
tomcervo
By ANITA GATES
Jane Russell, the voluptuous actress at the center of one of the most
highly publicized censorship episodes in movie history, the long-
delayed release of the 1940s western “The Outlaw,” died on Monday at
her home in Santa Maria, Calif. She was 89.
The cause was a respiratory-related illness, her daughter-in-law Etta
Waterfield told The Associated Press.
Ms. Russell was 19 and working as a doctor’s assistant when Howard
Hughes, returning to movie production after his aviation successes,
cast her as the tempestuous Rio McDonald, Sheriff Pat Garrett’s
girlfriend, in “The Outlaw,” which he directed.
A movie poster — which showed a sultry Ms. Russell in a cleavage-
revealing blouse falling off one shoulder, reclining in a haystack and
holding a gun — quickly became notorious and seemed to fuel movie
censors’ determination to prevent the film’s release because of scenes
that revealed too much, by 1940s standards, of the star’s breasts. The
Roman Catholic Church was one of the movie’s vocal opponents.
Although the film had its premiere and ran for nine weeks in San
Francisco in 1943, it did not open in New York until 1947 and was not
given a complete national release until 1950. Critics were generally
unimpressed by its quality, but it made Ms. Russell a star. The
specially engineered bra that Hughes was said to have designed for his
38D leading lady took its place in cinematic history, although Ms.
Russell always contended that she never actually wore it.
She went on to make some two dozen feature films, all but a handful of
them between 1948 and 1957 and many of them westerns.
In the western comedy “The Paleface” (1948), she played Calamity Jane
opposite Bob Hope, with whom she also starred in “Son of Paleface,”
the 1952 sequel. In the musical comedy that she called her favorite
film, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953), she starred with Marilyn
Monroe as one of two ambitious showgirls. Her numbers included “Two
Little Girls From Little Rock,” one of several duets with Monroe, and
the comic lament “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?” Two years later
she starred with Jeanne Crain in “Gentlemen Marry Brunettes,” a sequel
of sorts, set in Paris.
A number of her movies were musicals, and singing became a large part
of her career. She first appeared in Las Vegas in 1957 and was
performing in musical shows at small venues as recently as 2008.
Although she did considerable stage acting over the years, her sole
Broadway appearance was in 1971 in the Stephen Sondheim musical
“Company,” in which she replaced Elaine Stritch as the tough-talking
character who sings “The Ladies Who Lunch.”
Ms. Russell was best known in the 1970s and ’80s as the television
spokeswoman in commercials for Playtex bras, which she promoted as
ideal for “full-figured gals” like her.
Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell was born on June 21, 1921, in
Bemidji, Minn., the daughter of Roy and Geraldine Russell. Geraldine
had been an aspiring actress and a model. “The Girl in the Blue Hat,”
a portrait of her by the watercolorist Mary B. Titcomb, once hung in
the White House, bought by President Woodrow Wilson.
When Jane was 9 months old, before her four brothers were born, Roy
moved the family to Southern California for a job as an office
manager. He died when Jane was in her teens.
After high school, Jane took acting classes at Max Reinhardt’s theater
workshop and with Maria Ouspenskaya. She did some modeling for a
photographer friend but was working in a chiropodist’s office when a
photo of her found its way to Hughes’s casting people.
In 1943 she married her high school sweetheart, Bob Waterfield, a
U.C.L.A. football player who became the star quarterback of the Los
Angeles Rams. They adopted a daughter and two sons. (After a botched
abortion before her marriage, Ms. Russell was unable to have children.
She later became an outspoken opponent of abortion and an advocate of
adoption, founding the World Adoption International Fund in the
1950s.)
She and Mr. Waterfield divorced in 1967 after 24 years of marriage.
The following year she married Roger Barrett, an actor, who died of a
heart attack three months after the wedding.
In 1974, John Calvin Peoples, a real estate broker and retired Air
Force lieutenant, became her third husband, and they were together
until his death, in 1999. Ms. Russell had had previous problems with
alcohol, but they became worse after she was widowed again; her grown
children insisted that she undergo rehabilitation at the age of 79.
She also turned to conservative politics in her later years.
“These days I’m a teetotal, mean-spirited, right-wing, narrow-minded,
conservative Christian bigot, but not a racist,” she told an
Australian newspaper, The Daily Mail, in 2003. Bigotry, she added,
“just means you don’t have an open mind.”
By the time she married Mr. Peoples, her acting career was all but
over. After appearing in three movies in the mid-1960s, she had a
small role in her last film, “Darker Than Amber,” a 1970 action drama
starring Rod Taylor. She did relatively little television, but her
final screen role was in a 1986 episode of the NBC police drama
“Hunter.”
Complete information about her survivors was not immediately
available.
Ms. Russell was very public about her religious convictions. She
organized Bible study groups in Hollywood and wrote about having
experienced glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. In her memoir “My
Path and My Detours” (1985), she described the strength she drew from
Christianity.
A higher power was always there, she wrote, “telling me that if I
could just hold tough a little longer, I’d find myself around one more
dark corner, see one more spot of light and have one more drop of pure
joy in this journey called life.”