Film & TV / Music
Betty Hutton
1921–2007 · actress, singer, comedian, dancer
Paramount's high-energy musical star of the 1940s grew up poor in Depression-era Detroit and was discovered singing in the city's nightclubs.
- Born
Battle Creek, Michigan- Died
Palm Springs, California
aged 86- Birth name
- Elizabeth June Thornburg
- Also known as
- The Blonde Bombshell
- Detroit years
- 1929–1938
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Betty Hutton was born Elizabeth June Thornburg in Battle Creek in 1921. Her father left the family, and her mother kept her two daughters afloat by working as an auto upholsterer and running an illegal speakeasy out of their home, first in Lansing. Moving often to stay ahead of the police, they settled in Detroit when Betty was eight. The Depression years there were lean; she later recalled the family being down to a single can of beans. She attended Foch Intermediate School but quit in ninth grade, and by then she was already singing, first for her mother's customers and then with local bands. At 15 she tried New York, failed, and came back to Detroit. In 1938 bandleader Vincent Lopez heard her in a Detroit nightclub and hired her, and within two years she was on Broadway and headed for a Paramount contract.
Highlights
- Discovered in a Detroit nightclub by bandleader Vincent Lopez (1938)
- Paramount star of The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) and The Perils of Pauline (1947)
- Annie Oakley in MGM's Annie Get Your Gun (1950)
- Starred in the Best Picture winner The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
- Sister of big-band singer Marion Hutton
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 1
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Studied here · early 1930s
Foch Intermediate School
Status being checked
Hutton's last school in Detroit; she dropped out in ninth grade.