‘Blond Blitz’ Betty Hutton, 86, dies

HOLLYWOOD – Betty Hutton, the exuberant singer-actress who shot to Hollywood fame in the 1940s in musicals and comedies such as the madcap classic “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,” has died. Hutton, 86, died in her Palm Springs apartment from complications of colon cancer Sunday night.

During Hutton’s heyday at Paramount in the ‘40s, her high-energy performing style earned her nicknames such as “the Blond Bombshell,” “the Blond Blitz” and “the Incendiary Blonde.”

“The thing about Betty Hutton was she could also sing a song and break your heart, and she was a very good actress,” said Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne. “Behind the zaniness there was a very sweet, vulnerable person; and there was that in real life, as well.”

One of Hutton’s greatest screen triumphs came in 1950 when she starred as Annie Oakley in the Irving Berlin musical “Annie Get Your Gun.” But Hutton’s movie career ended shortly thereafter. Although she cashed in on her movie fame performing a nightclub act and made a stab at a television series, she virtually disappeared from the limelight.

In 1974, however, she generated headlines when she was discovered in an unlikely venue: the rectory of St. Anthony’s Church in Portsmouth, R.I., where she had begun working after meeting a Catholic priest while she was in detox for a dependency on sleeping pills and other drugs.

By then she had gone through four failed marriages, bankruptcy, the death of her mother in a fire and estrangement from her three daughters.

“I don’t want to go into how I got here,” Hutton told a reporter at the time. “I was a brokenhearted woman and didn’t want to live anymore. I should be dead, but I’m not.”