LOS ANGELES -- Jean Peters, 73, a farm girl who won a screen test in the 1940s and went on to star in films opposite Marlon Brando and Tyrone Power before marrying billionaire recluse Howard Hughes, died of leukemia Oct. 13 in La Jolla, Calif.
She made her film debut starring as Power's sultry lover in the 1947 swashbuckler "Captain From Castile" but gave up acting 10 years later, at the height of her career, when she secretly married Hughes, who had met her when she was still a teenager and he 20 years older.
Her other film credits include "It Happens Every Spring" (1949) with Ray Milland, "Viva Zapata!" (1952) with Brando, "Niagara" (1953) with Marilyn Monroe, "Pickup on South Street" (1953) with Widmark, "Three Coins in the Fountain" (1954) with Dorothy McGuire, "Apache" (1954) with Lancaster and "Broken Lance" (1954) with Tracy. Her final film turned out to be the 1955 drama "A Man Called Peter," which earned the actress critical acclaim.
Her overnight rise from obscurity to stardom is the stuff of movie legend. The green-eyed brunet landed a trip to Hollywood and a 1946 screen test at 20th Century Fox as the winner of the Miss Ohio pageant.
The story goes that Fox executives initially were little impressed with Miss Peters, and she returned to Ohio, only to be called back because Hughes, then a major investor in the studio, saw the footage and was taken with her. In any case, the studio ultimately signed her to a contract.
According to the biography "Howard Hughes: The Untold Story," the vaunted filmmaker, aviator and billionaire industrialist met Miss Peters in 1946 at a party in Newport Beach. Hughes invited the stunning 19-year-old starlet and her date, war hero Audie Murphy, to fly with him and several other guests to Santa Catalina Island aboard his private plane.
By some accounts, Hughes and Miss Peters immediately embarked on an unpublicized romance and were rumored to have been engaged before splitting in the mid-1950s, then they rekindled their relationship after Miss Peters's brief first marriage to Texas oilman Stuart Cramer.
In any event, Miss Peters--one of a prodigious line of Hughes involvements that allegedly included Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner--ultimately tied the knot in a secret 1957 ceremony in Tonapah, Nev.
As Hughes's spouse, Miss Peters abandoned her movie career and largely faded from public life while her eccentric husband drifted into seclusion. The couple reportedly spent much of their married life apart and were finally divorced in 1971. He died in 1976.
Miss Peters steadfastly declined to talk about her relationship with Hughes, telling Newsweek magazine in 1972, "My life with Howard Hughes was and shall remain a matter on which I will have no comment."
After nearly 20 years, Miss Peters returned to acting in the 1973 public television production of Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" and made a rare network TV appearance in the 1976 NBC miniseries, "Arthur Hailey's the Moneychangers."
Her last acting role was in the CBS television movie "Peter and Paul," produced by her third husband, Stanley Hough, a 20th Century Fox executive she married in 1971. He died about four years ago.
