Screen siren Jane Russell dies, aged 89

SHE was the voluptuous pin-up girl who set a million male hearts pounding during World War II, the favourite movie star of a generation of young men long before she’d made a movie more than a handful of them had ever seen.

Such was the stunning beauty of Jane Russell, and the marketing skills of the man who discovered her, the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes.

Russell, surrounded by family members, died on Monday at her home in the central coast city of Santa Maria. Her death from respiratory failure came 70 years after Hughes had put her on the path to stardom with his controversial Western The Outlaw. She was 89.