Million Dollar Mermaid (also known as The One Piece Bathing Suit in the UK) is a 1952 American biographical drama film about the life of Australian swimming star Annette Kellerman.

The film stars Esther Williams, Victor Mature, and Walter Pidgeon, with David Brian and Donna Corcoran.

In the late 19th century, a polio-stricken Australian girl, Annette Kellerman (Esther Williams), swims as a means to improve her health.

Her father, Frederick (Walter Pidgeon), who owns a music conservatory, accepts a teaching position in England.

Aboard ship, Annette encounters the American promoter James Sullivan (Victor Mature) and his associate Doc Cronnol (Jesse White), who are taking a boxing kangaroo called Sydney with them to London.

Manager Alfred Harper (David Brian) does not offer them a job in the show, so Annette goes to Boston for a highly publicized swim and gets in hot water for wearing a one-piece suit too revealing for its time.

After the death of her father, she travels to Montauk at the behest of Doc to try to dissuade Jimmy from flying in an air race with a $50,000 prize.

As time passes, Harper falls in love with Annette while she travels to Hollywood to make a film.

In 1947, it was reported that Esther Williams wanted MGM to buy the rights to Annette Kellerman's life story as a vehicle for her.

[5] Kellerman was unhappy that MGM had greatly changed her film Neptune's Daughter when they remade it as an Esther Williams vehicle.

She says she did not hear anything back from the studio for a number of months until she read an article in the trade papers that the film was being made.

[7] In February 1951, it was announced MGM had signed a deal with Kellerman to make a film based on her life.

I went through half a dozen scripts, all of which I rejected because they just wanted to make it a glamorous, typically Hollywood, romance story.

Kellerman said Ford was "the nearest thing I can think of to my dear husband-not too glamorous, and he implies the strength and understanding necessary for the part.

Kellerman later said she thought the film's depiction of Sullivan was "the antithesis" of the character in real life (she called him a "quiet, unassuming" man who " never did anything cheap").

She wrote in her memoir that she was already disoriented atop the platform after seven broken eardrums as the wages of her years working underwater.