Annette Kellerman (1887-1975)

Birthplace:
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Born:
July 6, 1887

Died:
November 5, 1975

Australian-born swimming champion and actress, she played a significant role in the popularization of swimming as a sport, especially for women. Also known as "The Million Dollar Mermaid". Born Annette Marie Sarah Kellerman in Sydney, Australia, on July 6, 1886; died in Southport, Queensland, Australia, on the 6th November 1975; married James R. Sullivan (her manager), in 1912.  She suffered from a form of Poliomyelitis that had left her partially crippled as a child. She had to wear an iron brace up to her hips. Her father pushed her to swim as a therapeutic means of overcoming this condition. Her legs were normal by the time she was 13 as a result. She began swimming competions while still a teenager and won the New South Wales swimming championships in 1902. She went to England in 1904 with her father and she won a 26-mile race on the Thames.  With her brother as manager, came to U.S. and made first public appearance (1907); made first film, a kind of documentary, as early as 1909, and her last just before the end of the silent era; a champion swimmer, recognized health authority, and exponent of physical culture, was the first woman swimmer to achieve acclaim; is said to have devised the idea of formation swimming as an art, is credited with having introduced the single-piece swimsuit (even arrested for indecent exposure for wearing it) and did much to facilitate the entry of women into the aquatic sports by gradually making acceptable the kind of minimal swimwear necessary to allow freedom of movement and speed in the water; retired to her native Australia (1935). Awards: Holder of the world record for the two-, five- and ten-minute swimming championships.  She was also the first woman to appear fully nude in a movie; "A Daughter of the Gods" (1916).

Additional information:

The Search Form


About the Movie Section

Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).

Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.

Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

Regarding profile removals and data corrections:

  • If you would like your profile removed from this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's gone from their site, it should soon be gone from this site.
  • If you would like to correct movie data on this site, please contact the source of this data directly, TheMovieDB. My assumption is: once it's corrected on their site, it should soon be corrected on this site.
  • For additional corrections and profile removals, please e-mail The Open Movie Database (OMDb).

Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.