Rita Tushingham

. Esther Williams retired from acting in the early 1960s. The Knack (and how to get it) was filmed in the Southam Street area of Notting Hill. Her brother, Stanton Williams, also had a brief acting career during the 1920s before his death while still a teenager. She was an icon of 1960s Britain, and was popularised again in the 1980s by Morrissey. Her third husband was actor Fernando Lamas. She had memorable performances in The Leather Boys (1963), The Knack...And How to Get It (1965) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). She was romantically linked with Jeff Chandler, and has been married four times.

Her screen debut was in A Taste of Honey in 1961, the groundbreaking movie of the British realist tradition. Her love life was a source of media interest. She was born on 14 March 1940 in Liverpool, and started her career as a stage actress at the Liverpool Playhouse. In her autobiography, Williams details several other occasions in which she nearly drowned shooting her oxygen-defying stunts. Rita Tushingham is an English actress. Her many hours spent submerged resulted in her rupturing her eardrums numerous times. She broke her neck filming a 50-foot dive off a tower during a climactic musical number for the 1952 release Million Dollar Mermaid which landed her in a body cast for six months (she subsequently recovered though she still suffers headaches as a result of the accident).

Many of her films, such as Million Dollar Mermaid and Jupiter's Darling, contained elaborately staged swimming scenes, obtained not without physical cost to the performer. Williams instead went to Hollywood, and quickly became a popular star of the 1940s and 1950s. She qualified to be in the United States swim team in the 1940 Olympics, but the games were canceled due to World War II. Esther Williams was born in Inglewood, California, and was enthusistic about swimming from her youth.

Esther Jane Williams (born 8 August 1922) is a United States swimmer and movie star. Williams, Esther, The Million Dollar Mermaid: An Autobiography, Simon & Schuster, 1999.