During Ms. 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."
Cracked Bob Hope at the time: "If they put a propeller on Hutton and sent her over Germany, the war would be over by Christmas."
Ms. Hutton was at the top of the heap when she walked out of her Paramount contract in 1952, reportedly in a dispute over her demand that her husband at the time direct her films. She made only one movie, "Spring Reunion" in 1957, after that.
Unlike other actresses who have been called "blond bombshells," Ms. Hutton had a screen personality that had more to do with energy and humor than sex.
Time magazine wrote in 1950: "Betty Hutton, who is not remarkably pretty by movie standards, nor a remarkably good singer or dancer, has a vividly unique personality in a town that tends to reduce beauty and talent to mass-produced patterns. Watching her in action has some of the fascination of waiting for a wildly sputtering fuse to touch off an alarmingly large firecracker."
It said she had "a bellicose zeal and a tomboyish winsomeness that suggested a cross between one of the Furies and Little Orphan Annie."
Ms. Hutton could be brash behind the camera, too, saying in 1954, "When I'm working with jerks with no talent, I raise hell until I get what I want."
An early notable film was "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek," the 1944 Preston Sturges satire that rattled the censors with the story of a young woman who gets pregnant after a spur-of-the-moment marriage and can't quite remember who the father is.
Sturges called Ms. Hutton "a full-fledged actress with every talent the noun implies."
"She plays in musicals because the public, which can do practically nothing well, is willing to concede its entertainers only one talent," he said.
Several films were biopics: "Incendiary Blonde," about actress and nightclub queen Texas Guinan; "Perils of Pauline," about silent-screen serial heroine Pearl White; and "Somebody Loves Me," about singer Blossom Seeley.
