Voluptuous sex symbol and star of Hollywood films, TV, and nightclubs, Jane Russell was the daughter of an actress. She worked as a receptionist and model, and studied theater at Max Reinhardt's Theatrical Workshop and with Maria Ouspenskaya. Endowed with a large bust, she won the lead role in Howard Hughes's The Outlaw (1941) after Hughes conducted a nationwide search for a curvaceous actress, eventually finding her working in his dentist's office. The film caused a storm of controversy due primarily to the amount of cleavage shown by Russell onscreen, and, after brief releases in 1941 and 1943, it was not officially released until 1950. The controversy brought her much publicity, often in the form of off-color, sophomoric jokes. However, she surpassed her mindless "bombshell" image and went on to perform with versatility in a number of films during the subsequent three decades, including comedies with Bob Hope and musicals with Marilyn Monroe. She often played cynical, "tough broads," and starred in the Broadway musical Company in 1971. TV viewers may also remember her for a series of bra commercials during the '70s. ~ Rovi
Actress/singer Jane Russell was best known as Marilyn Monroe's brunette sidekick in the 1953 movie adaptation of the 1949 musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and for her other appearances in films of the 1940s and '50s, notably her debut in the racy (for its time) The Outlaw. But her sexy screen image was belied by her devout Christian faith and devotion to family, and while her screen persona dominates impressions about her career, she also worked steadily in other media including radio, recording, television, cabaret, and theater. In fact, her movie work makes up a relatively brief period in that career: among the two dozen feature films in which she appeared, 16 were released between 1951 and 1957, but she was still working regularly in the early '70s, and continued to work at least occasionally through the end of the 1980s.
Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell was born at the summer home of her maternal grandparents in Bemidji, MN, on June 21, 1921. She was the first of five children and the only girl born to Roy William Russell, who soon became an office manager for the Jergens soap company, and Geraldine (Jacobi) Russell, a former actress who later taught elocution. Russell was always called by her second name; her mother had chosen it because she thought "Jane Russell" would look good on a marquee. At the time of her birth, Russell's parents lived in Canada, but they moved to Glendale, CA, when she was nine months old, later moving to Burbank and, when she was 12, to a farm in Van Nuys. Russell took piano lessons as a child and developed an interest in acting that led her to attend two drama schools after she graduated from Van Nuys High School in 1939. Her stay at the Theatrical Workshop run by Max Reinhardt was brief, but she spent six months at Maria Ouspenskaya's School of Dramatic Arts. After that, she found work modeling and was given screen tests at some of the movie studios. In the summer of 1940, at the age of 19, she was cast in a starring role in The Outlaw, a Western about Billy the Kid being made by the eccentric aviator, inventor, business executive, and movie producer Howard Hughes, and she signed a seven-year contract with Hughes.
Veteran director Howard Hawks began work on The Outlaw, but soon fell out with Hughes, who took over the direction of the film himself as the shooting schedule extended over nine months. Meanwhile, a publicity campaign emphasizing provocative photographs of the buxom Russell made her a star long before the movie appeared. Hughes revealed his interest in Russell's curves as the movie's selling point by designing a seamless bra for her to wear. She didn't use it, but the camera still caught plenty of her cleavage, and Hughes spent two years arguing with the Hays Office, Hollywood's censors, before he managed to get a limited release for The Outlaw in San Francisco in February 1943. Even then, it did not get much distribution, appearing again in 1946, 1947, and 1950. When it could get into theaters, however, it was popular, eventually ranking as the third most successful film released in 1943.
On April 24, 1943, Russell married her high-school sweetheart, Robert Waterfield, who was at the time a student at UCLA and the quarterback of the college football team. He went on to a successful professional football career with the Los Angeles Rams as a player and a coach. Russell continued in the odd position of being a movie star whose one movie had barely been seen until 1945, when Hughes loaned her out to United Artists to star in the drama Young Widow, which opened in 1946. As part of this deal, United Artists sponsored the second release of The Outlaw, and Russell accompanied showings of the film in Chicago, Atlantic City, and Boston, singing in public for the first time. Her singing was well received, and she accepted an offer from bandleader Kay Kyser to perform on his radio program, Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge, on NBC, replacing his regular female singer, Ginny Sims, who had left the band to go solo. Kyser also sent Russell to a vocal coach; he was sufficiently impressed with the results to sign her for 12 weeks of appearances and, on January 8, 1947, to use her on a recording session that produced the single "As Long as I Live," released by Columbia Records, her recording debut. After a second session resulted in another single, "Boin-n-n-g!," Columbia signed Russell to a solo contract, and in July she recorded eight torch songs for her four-disc, 78-rpm debut album, Let's Put Out the Lights.
At the end of 1947, Russell's contract with Hughes was set to run out and, despite the lack of work it had brought her, she re-upped for another seven years. Perhaps Hughes shared his plans with her; on May 10, 1948, he bought the RKO film studio, assuring her of plenty of work during her second contract. That work began with another loan-out, this time to Paramount, where she co-starred with Bob Hope in the Western comedy The Paleface. The Paleface, which went on to become the third biggest box office hit of the year, demonstrated her talent for comedy and for singing, as she got to join Hope on "Buttons and Bows," which won the Academy Award for best song. After finishing work on the film, she made her nightclub debut at the Latin Quarter in Miami Beach, but her engagement was canceled after a misunderstanding with the club owner, who objected to her impromptu appearance "in street clothes" at a local beauty contest. She would return to nightclub work later. Meanwhile, she went into production on her first RKO feature, a Western called Montana Belle. Unfortunately, the film was shelved and did not turn up in theaters until the fall of 1952. A similar fate befell the fifth film she shot, Double Dynamite, in which she co-starred with Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx. Made in the winter of 1948-1949, it didn't open until the fall of 1951. This fact notwithstanding, Columbia promptly and prematurely released a single of "Kisses and Tears," a song from the picture, after Sinatra and Russell recorded a studio version of it in February 1950.
No stranger to having her work left in the can after so many years with Hughes, Russell simply went on to her next film project, a crime drama with Robert Mitchum called His Kind of Woman. In November 1950, she did a recording session for London Records that included the two songs to be featured in the film, "Five Little Miles from San Berdoo" and "You'll Know." The movie, the sixth she had shot but only the fourth to be released, appeared during the summer of 1951. On June 21, 1951, her 30th birthday, she and her husband adopted a newborn baby girl. They adopted a boy four months later, and in 1956 added another son. Russell became an adoption activist, working to ease restrictions internationally, and founded an organization with that purpose, the World Adoption International Fund (WAIF). Her next film, The Las Vegas Story, released in January 1952, was a drama in which she got to sing the standards "I Get Along Without You Very Well" and "My Resistance Is Low." In Macao, another drama with Mitchum released in the spring, she sang three songs, among them "One for My Baby." She returned to Paramount, and to Bob Hope, for Son of Paleface, released in the fall, and she and Hope teamed up for a Capitol Records single of two songs from the picture, "Am I in Love?" and "Wing Ding Tonight." (She also had a cameo in the next Hope/Bing Crosby "road" picture, Road to Bali.) Montana Belle finally appeared a few weeks later, and it was accompanied by her single of the song "The Gilded Lily," which was featured in the film, on a recording released by American Records.
Russell's film career hit its peak when she was loaned out to 20th Century Fox for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, released in July 1953. MGM Records released a soundtrack album on which she sang "Bye Bye Baby" and "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?," and, with Marilyn Monroe, "A Little Girl from Little Rock" and "When Love Goes Wrong (Nothing Goes Right)." The album was a Top Ten hit. Her success in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes caused RKO to plan its own full-fledged musical for her, and The French Line appeared in 1954, along with a soundtrack album released by Mercury Records. Meanwhile, she formed a vocal quartet with former band singer Connie Haines, Beryl Davis, and Della Russell to sing gospel songs, and they signed to Coral Records, which released the chart single "Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord"/"Do Lord," followed by an LP, Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord. Russell also cut a solo single, "Forevermore," for Coral, backed with a duet with Johnny Desmond, "Backward, Turn Backward." And Della Russell was replaced by Rhonda Fleming for another single by the quartet, "Give Me That Old Time Religion"/"Jacob's Ladder."
Russell made one more picture for RKO, the adventure film Underwater! released in the winter of 1955, before Howard Hughes sold the studio. Essentially, he was getting out of the motion picture business, but that didn't keep him from re-signing Russell to a new, non-exclusive million-dollar contract that ran 20 years (largely as a means of spreading out payments for tax purposes). Under the terms of the contract, she was to be loaned out to other studios and was able to set up her own production company, which quickly contracted with United Artists, though her next picture, Foxfire, was a loan-out to Universal. The first film she made under the United Artists deal was Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, a musical in which she sang standards like "Ain't Misbehavin'" and for which Coral released a soundtrack album.
The Tall Men, a Western pairing her with Clark Gable, was made for 20th Century Fox and appeared in theaters about the same time in the fall of 1955. Then she went to Columbia Pictures to play a Gypsy in Hot Blood, released in March 1956, and on to 20th Century Fox for The Revolt of Mamie Stover, in which she played a saloon singer and got to sing "If You Wanna See Mamie Tonight," which she recorded for a Capitol Records single. At the same time, her company was also producing films in which she did not appear: Run for the Sun and The King and Four Queens, the latter starring Gable. Those films, Russell wrote in her autobiography, My Path & My Detours (1985), were financially successful. But the over-budget Gentlemen Marry Brunettes and her next picture, The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown (1957), were not. As a result, United Artists became less enthusiastic about new scripts she submitted, and after a few years of rejections, she got the message and closed the company.
Although Russell did a handful of small character parts and cameos in films in the 1960s and early '70s (Fate Is the Hunter [1964], Johnny Reno [1966], Waco [1966], The Born Losers [1967], Darker Than Amber [1970]), her career as a major movie star was over as of 1957, when she was 36 years old. In her autobiography, she summed up her screen work accurately. "The films that didn't displease me and which I especially enjoyed doing were The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, [Paleface, Son of Paleface], and The Tall Men," she wrote. "Other than those, I got little artistic satisfaction from my work. Howard Hughes was a good and fair boss, but he lacked the artistic taste to do the kind of films I really would have liked to be in, with parts I could get my teeth into. He wasn't the man I needed if I was to have developed into a serious actress. So I really have no idea how far I could have gone in films....I was definitely a victim of Hollywood typecasting."
Fortunately, Russell's Hollywood experience had provided her with the means to launch the second, multifaceted stage of her career. It had made her a star with a well-known name, and it had demonstrated her ability to act, sing, and dance. She was able to use those talents first to mount a nightclub act that she took to the famed Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in October 1957, followed by engagements at the Latin Quarter in New York, the Living Room in Chicago, and other clubs in the U.S. and around the world. Then, there were radio programs on which she sang, backed by Bobby Troup and his quartet, and a single of "It Never Entered My Mind" and "You're Mine" with Troup. There was also what was now a gospel vocal trio with Connie Haines and Beryl Davis (Della Russell and Rhonda Fleming having dropped out), which performed in clubs and recorded an album called The Magic of Believing for Capitol in 1957 and a single, "Cumana," for Warner Bros. Records in 1961. (After Haines retired, the duo of Russell and Davis sometimes performed.) And Russell recorded a self-titled solo album for MGM Records in 1959.
The other side of her new career was stage acting. As a star, she was an attractive name for many kinds of theater -- regional productions, summer theater, dinner theater -- around the country and overseas. This required an adjustment, of course, since she had done only film acting, and now was required to learn whole scripts and perform them live over and over. But she made the adjustment, and soon was starring in post-Broadway productions of such musicals as Bells Are Ringing and Pal Joey. A particular favorite that she performed many times was the 1965 mystery play Catch Me If You Can.
In July 1968, Russell divorced her husband, Robert Waterfield. She married actor Roger Barrett on August 25, 1968, but Barrett died of a heart attack less than three months later on November 18, 1968. Plunged into grief, she worked sparingly over the next couple of years, but in early 1971 she received an offer that marked the pinnacle of her post-Hollywood career when she was asked to replace Elaine Stritch on Broadway in the musical Company, playing the part of Joanne and singing the show-stopping number "The Ladies Who Lunch." This was her Broadway debut, and she spent six months in the show. Another notable offer in the early '70s came from a bra manufacturer that wanted her to become its national spokeswoman on television commercials, an association she called "a natural." For more than a decade, audiences watched her on TV touting the virtues of the product for "full-figured gals" like herself.
On January 31, 1974, Russell married for a third time to retired Air Force officer and real estate broker John Peoples. (He died on April 9, 1999.) She gradually cut back on her work schedule in the late '70s, settling with Peoples in Sedona, AZ, and later moved to Santa Maria, CA. But she kept her hand in during the '80s. In 1984, she appeared in a continuing role on the NBC television series The Yellow Rose, and she also resurrected her trio with Beryl Davis and an out-of-retirement Connie Haines for a five-week national tour. On November 12, 1989, she appeared at the London Palladium as part of Stairway to the Stars, a benefit concert for the charity Aid of Action for the Crippled Child, an effort that returned her to record stores when the British First Night Records label released an album of the event in 1995. Jane Russell died of respiratory failure at her home in Santa Maria, CA on February 28, 2011; she was 89 years old. ~ William Ruhlmann, Rovi
Bob Waterfield
(m. 1943–67, divorced)
Roger Barrett
(m. 1968–68, his death)
John Calvin Peoples
(m. 1974–99, his death)
Children
1 daughter, 2 sons
Jane Russell (June 21, 1921 – February 28, 2011)[2] was an American film actress and was one of Hollywood's leading sex symbols in the 1940s and 1950s.
Russell moved from the Midwest to California, where she had her first film role in 1943 with The Outlaw. In 1947, Russell delved into music before returning to films. After starring in multiple films in the 1950s, Russell again returned to music while completing several other films in the 1960s. She starred in over 20 films throughout her career.
Russell married three times and adopted three children and, in 1955, founded the World Adoption International Fund. For her achievements in film, she received several accolades including having her hand and foot prints immortalized in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Born Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell in Bemidji, Minnesota,[3] Russell was the eldest child and only daughter of the five children of Roy William Russell (January 5, 1890 – July 18, 1937) and Geraldine Jacobi (January 2, 1891 – December 26, 1986). Her brothers are Thomas (born 1924), Kenneth (born 1925), Jamie (born 1927) and Wallace (born 1929).[4]
Her father had been a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, and her mother had been an actress with a road troupe.[5] Later the family moved to Southern California and her father worked as an office manager.[3]
Russell's mother arranged for her to take piano lessons. In addition to music, she was interested in drama and participated in stage productions at Van Nuys High School.[6] Her early ambition was to be a designer of some kind, until the death of her father at forty-six, when she decided to work as a receptionist after graduation. She also modeled for photographers and, at the urging of her mother, studied drama and acting with Max Reinhardt's Theatrical Workshop and with Russian actress Maria Ouspenskaya.[3]
In 1940, Russell was signed to a seven-year contract by filmmogulHoward Hughes[7] and made her motion picture debut in The Outlaw (1943), a story about Billy the Kid that went to great lengths to showcase her voluptuous figure. Although the movie was completed in 1941, it was not released until 1943, and then in a limited release. It was finally released to a wide distribution in 1946. There were problems with the censorship of the production code over the way her ample cleavage was displayed. When the movie was finally passed, it had a general release in 1946. During that time, she was kept busy doing publicity and became known nationally.[8] Contrary to countless incorrect reports in the media since the release of The Outlaw, Russell did not wear the specially designed underwire bra that Howard Hughes had designed and made for her to wear during filming. According to Jane's 1988 autobiography, she said the bra was so uncomfortable that she secretly discarded it and wore her own bra with the cups padded with tissue and the straps pulled up to elevate her breasts.[9][10]
With measurements of 38D-24-36 and standing 5'7" (97-61-91 cm and 1.7 meters), Russell was more statuesque than most of her contemporaries. Her favorite co-star Bob Hope once introduced her as "the two and only Jane Russell." He also joked, "Culture is the ability to describe Jane Russell without moving your hands." Howard Hughes said, "There are two good reasons why men go to see her. Those are enough." A publicity still for the movie showed her lying on a pile of straw, her blouse wide open showing ample cleavage and stretched tight across her voluptuous breasts. Her left hand was behind her head of black hair and the right hand held a pistol.[8] The image was a popular pin-up photo with servicemen during World War II. She did not appear in another movie until 1946 when she played Joan Kenwood in Young Widow for RKO.
Speaking about her sex appeal, Jane Russell said, "Sex appeal is good—but not in bad taste. Then it's ugly. I don't think a star has any business posing in a vulgar way. I've seen plenty of pin-up pictures that have sex appeal, interest,and allure, but they're not vulgar. They have a little art to them. Marilyn's calendar was artistic." [11][12]
In 1947, Russell attempted to launch a musical career. She sang with the Kay Kyser Orchestra on radio and recorded two singles with his band, "As Long As I Live" and "Boin-n-n-ng!" She also cut a 78 rpm album that year for Columbia Records, Let's Put Out the Lights, which included eight torch ballads and cover art that included a diaphanous gown that for once put the focus more on her legs than on her breasts. In a 2009 interview for the liner notes to another CD, Fine and Dandy, Russell denounced the Columbia album as "horrible and boring to listen to." It was reissued on CD in 2002, in a package that also included the Kyser singles and two songs she recorded for Columbia in 1949 that had gone unreleased at the time. In 1950, she recorded a single, "Kisses and Tears," with Frank Sinatra and The Modernaires for Columbia.
In Howard Hughes's RKO production The French Line (1954), the movie's penultimate moment showed Russell in a form-fitting one-piece bathing suit with strategic cut outs, performing a then-provocative musical number titled "Lookin' for Trouble." In her autobiography, Russell said that the revealing outfit was an alternative to Hughes' original suggestion of a bikini, a very racy choice for a movie costume in 1954. Russell said that she initially wore the bikini in front of her "horrified" movie crew while "feeling very naked."
On the musical front, Russell formed the Hollywood Christian Group, a gospel quartet, with Connie Haines, Beryl Davis, and Della Russell. Haines was a former vocalist in the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey orchestras, while Davis was a British emigrant who had moved to the U.S. after success entertaining American troops stationed in England during World War II. With Della Russell as a fourth voice and backed by an orchestra conducted by Lyn Murray, their Coral single "Do Lord" reached number 27 on the Billboard singles chart in May 1954, selling two million copies. Russell, Haines and Davis followed up with an LP for Capitol Records, The Magic of Believing.[13] According to the liner notes on this album, the group started when the women met at a church social. Later, another Hollywood bombshell, Rhonda Fleming, joined them for more gospel recordings. A collection of some of Russell's gospel and secular recordings was issued on CD in Britain in 2005, and the Capitol LP was issued on CD in 2008, in a package that also included more secular recordings, including Russell's spoken word performances of Hollywood Riding Hood and Hollywood Cinderella backed by a jazz group that featured Terry Gibbs and Tony Scott.[14]
In October 1957, she debuted in a successful solo nightclub act at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. She also fulfilled later engagements in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, South America and Europe. A self-titled solo LP was issued on MGM Records in 1959. It was reissued on CD in 2009 under the title Fine and Dandy, and the CD included some demo and soundtrack recordings as well. "I finally got to make a record the way I wanted to make it," she said of the MGM album in the liner notes to the CD reissue. In 1959, she debuted with a tour of Janus in New England, performed in Skylark and also starred in Bells Are Ringing at the Westchester Town House in Yonkers, New York.[15][16]
In 1999, she remarked, "Why did I quit movies? Because I was getting too old! You couldn't go on acting in those years if you were an actress over 30."[18]
Other venues
In 1971, she starred in the musical drama Company, making her debut on Broadway in the role of Joanne, succeeding Elaine Stritch. Russell performed the role of Joanne for almost six months. Also in the 1970s, she started appearing in television commercials as a spokeswoman for Playtex "'Cross-Your-Heart Bras' for us full-figured gals", featuring the "18-Hour Bra," still one of International Playtex's best-known products even as of early March of 2011. She wrote an autobiography in 1985, Jane Russell: My Path and My Detours. In 1989, she received the Women's International Center (WIC) Living Legacy Award.[5]
Russell was voted one of the 40 Most Iconic Movie Goddesses of all time in 2009 by Glamour (UK edition).[21]
Portrayals
Russell was portrayed by Renee Henderson in the 2001 CBS mini-series Blonde, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates and portrayed leaving her imprints at Grauman's along with Marilyn Monroe in the HBO film Norma Jean & Marilyn starring Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino.
At age 18, she became pregnant while dating her high school sweetheart, Bob Waterfield, who in 1943 became her first husband. Russell went to a back-street abortionist. "I had a botched abortion and it was terrible. Afterwards my own doctor said: 'What butcher did this to you?' I had to be taken to hospital. I was so ill I nearly died." The abortion left her infertile[8][23] and for the remainder of her life she believed that abortion was wrong under any circumstances, even rape or incest.[8] She described herself as "vigorously pro-life".[24]
In February 1952, she and Waterfield adopted a baby girl, Tracy. In December 1952, they adopted a fifteen-month-old boy, Thomas, whose birth mother, Hannah McDermott had moved to London to escape poverty in Derry, Northern Ireland, and in 1956 she and Waterfield adopted a nine-month-old boy, Robert John. In 1955 she founded World Adoption International Fund (WAIF), an organization to place children with adoptive families and which pioneered adoptions from foreign countries by Americans.[25] At the height of her career, Russell started the "Hollywood Christian Group," a weekly Bible study at her home which was attended by many of the leading names in the film industry.[8]
^Stover, Laren; Burdette, Nicole (2001). The Bombshell Manual of Style (Illustrations by Ruben Toledo ed.). New York: Hyperion. pp. 190. ISBN978-0786866946. p. 13
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