Mitzi Gaynor, the leggy entertainer whose saucy vitality and blond beauty graced the big screen in South Pacific and on Las Vegas stages and in spectacular TV specials, has died Oct 17 (of natural causes). She was 93.

Gaynor received top billing over The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show on February. 16, 1964.

“As we celebrate her legacy, we offer our thanks to her friends and fans and the countless audiences she entertained throughout her long life,” Rene Reyes and Shane Rosamonda of Gaynor’s MGMT team said on the entertainer’s X.

With energetic singing and dancing, the feisty Gaynor stood out in such movies as My Blue Heaven (1950) with Betty Grable and Dan Dailey; in Irving Berlin’s There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954), opposite Ethel Merman and Monroe and in the Cole Porter MGM musical Les Girls (1957) with Gene Kelly, directed by George Cukor.

In 1957, Gaynor was involved in a fierce competition to win the role of Navy nurse Nellie Forbush in Joshua Logan’s South Pacific, the adaptation of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway hit musical.

“I was filming The Joker Is Wild with Frank Sinatra and got the call that I’d be auditioning for Oscar Hammerstein at the Beverly Hills Hotel ballroom for South Pacific,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 2013. “I did ‘Honey Bun,’ I did ‘A Cockeyed Optimist.’ I did everything but strip.

She famously sang “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” and “Some Enchanted Evening” in the 1958 film, and the exotic World War II-set musical became the third highest-grossing movie ($17.5 million, or $147 million today) of the year.

Gaynor appeared in Donen’s Surprise Package (1960), a musical comedy that also starred Yul Brenner.

With the Hollywood musical fading, she retired from movies after For Love or Money (1963), while in her early 30s.

“I quit films because they quit me,” she said in 2012 interview for the TV Academy Foundation. “Marilyn Monroe was now the new Alice Faye/Betty Grable, she was doing the musicals at Fox. I wasn’t going to do My Fair Lady, and I wasn’t going to sing ‘The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Screaming’ — there was nothing for me to do.”

After what the Catholic Church called a “lascivious” 13-minute performance of her act on the Sullivan show — she was introduced as “Hollywood’s Mitzi Gaynor!!!” — the Beatles requested her autograph.

They were all on the show broadcast from a Miami hotel, seen by 70 million viewers; a week earlier, Sullivan had introduced the Fab Four to America for the first time.

Five years later, she headlined the first of 6 annual specials for CBS, including Mitzi and a Hundred Guys; Mitzi … A Tribute to the American Housewife; Mitzi … Zings Into Spring; and Mitzi … What’s Hot, What’s Not.

Gaynor said she regularly was approached to star in a weekly network variety show but refused. “Gene Kelly once told me, ‘Only do event television,’” she said.

After all her years working on TV, she finally won an Emmy in 2008, for her PBS special Mitzi Gaynor: Razzle Dazzle! The Special Years.

She was born Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber in Chicago on Sept. 4, 1931. Her mother was dancer and her father cellist, and she took her first dance class at age 8. An only child, she and her parents moved to Elgin, Illinois, then to Detroit and finally to L.A. when she was 11, to follow her dance teacher.

She then danced during a comedy bit in a West Coast production of Jerome Kerns’ Roberta, starring Tom Ewell. That led to gigs in touring productions of The Fortune Teller (Gypsy Lady on Broadway), Song of Norway (as Miss Anders, her first speaking part), Naughty Marietta opposite Susanna Foster and as Katie in 1949’s The Great Waltz.

Fox was grooming her to be the next Grable, and in quick succession, she starred in the Jeanne Crain sorority story Take Care of My Little Girl (1951); Golden Girl (1951), set amid the California Gold Rush; the comedy We’re Not Married! (1952) with Monroe; Bloodhounds of Broadway (1952); Down Among the Sheltering Palms (1953); The I Don’t Care Girl (1953); Three Young Texans (1954); and The Birds and the Bees (1956)‚ an RKO remake of The Lady Eve.

Gaynor said she dated Howard Hughes for several months and they broke up when she was 19.  He begged her to marry him but “found out that he’d asked 400 other girls to marry him, too.”

She was married to Bean, who started out as a public relations executive at MCA, from 1954 until his death in 2006.