MUMBAI: Jane Russell, who personified beauty and sexuality in the times of World War II and also reigned during the era of Hollywood moguls passed away due to respiratory failure on 28February in California. She was 89.

She is survived by her three children, Thomas K. Waterfield, Tracy Foundas and Robert Waterfield, and six grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

Russell lived a full life, from her days as a wartime pin-up girl to her Hollywood career and to her retirement years, where she was a philanthropist and active churchgoer. She reflected the post-war era of prosperity and more free-wheeling lifestyles as Hughes promoted her relentlessly throughout World War II.

Though she was widely known as a wartime pin-up queen, she ruled in Hollywood under the tutelage of billionaire Howard Hughes who was determined to make Russell a star of the first order in Tinseltown.

Among her films were His Kind of Woman with Robert Mitchum, Double Dynamite with Frank Sinatra and The Las Vegas Story with Victor Mature.