Teenage swimming champion who made her film debut in a 1942 Andy Hardy film, "Andy Hardy's Double Life". Two years later Williams starred in "Bathing Beauty" (1944), the first of a series of effervescent MGM swimming musicals--a curious, if lucrative sub-genre, created especially for her--which continued to pull large, enthusiastic audiences into the mid-1950s. Among a number of bland, interchangeable efforts, her better films included "Neptune's Daughter" (1949), "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" (1949, in which she did not swim), "Easy to Love" (1953) and "Dangerous When Wet" (1953), in which her pool partners included cartoon characters Tom and Jerry.
To her credit Williams approached her lightweight roles with tongue firmly in cheek; this quality, besides her vivaciously sexy, radiantly healthy appearance and her suprisingly complex and entertaining water ballets, in which she swam, dived, posed and water skied, helps explain her decade of popularity in what theoretically might have been a very brief period of freak success. Williams' subsequent attempts at dramatic roles (e.g., "The Unguarded Moment" 1956) were less than inspiring and she wisely retired from the movies in the 1960s. She later enjoyed success in the swimming pool and swimming-for-fitness businesses and contributed to the acceptance of synchronized swimming--a sport she helped to develop through her films--as an Olympic event. In her later years, Williams was frequently visible as a wry, amusingly dishy chat show guest about the old Hollywood studio system days. Her third husband (from 1967 to his 1982 death) was actor Fernando Lamas, who was her leading man in "Dangerous When Wet".