Betty Hutton, who died Sunday in Palm Springs at 86, brought frenetic “whoop and holler” song-and-dance skills to a string of Hollywood roles in the 1940s and 1950s, notably as Annie Oakley in “Annie Get Your Gun.”

In that role, as in her early breakthrough on Broadway in “Panama Hattie” (1940), she stepped into the shoes of another eccentric American singer, Ethel Merman.

Newly plucked from Broadway, Hutton made her film debut in “The Fleet’s In” (1942), singing and dancing the show-stopping number “Arthur Murray Taught Me to Dance in a Hurry.” In Preston Sturges’s comedy “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” (1944), she took her first non-singing role, as Trudy Kockenlocker, a small-town girl who wakes up married and pregnant after a night with a group of servicemen but can’t seem to remember who the father is. The role rattled censors, but Sturges called Hutton “a full-fledged actress with every talent the noun implies.”

Her career peaked with “Annie Get Your Gun” (1950), which inspired Time magazine to write: “Betty Hutton, who is not remarkably pretty, by movie standards, nor a remarkably good singer or dancer, has a vividly unique personality in a town that tends to reduce beauty and talent to mass-produced patterns. Watching her in action has some of the fascination of waiting for a wildly sputtering fuse to touch off an alarmingly large firecracker.”

The New York Sun’s critic was more laconic: “Miss Hutton grabs hold of the picture and squeezes all possible entertainment out of it.”

But making “Annie” — in which she drew undeserved criticism for replacing an ailing Judy Garland — proved an acrimonious and dispiriting experience for Hutton. Despite making at least one more high-profile film, Cecil B. De-Mille’s “Greatest Show on Earth” (1952), in which she soared on the flying trapeze — Hutton was mostly done with the movies. She appeared often in 1950s television and hosted her own variety show on CBS in 1959. But marital difficulties and drugs drew her downward, and she was rarely seen after the mid-1960s.

Playing, however hilariously, the small-town survivor came naturally to Hutton, born Elizabeth June Thornburg on February 26, 1921, in Battle Creek, Mich. Her father died when she was young, and her alcoholic mother supported the family fitfully with a speakeasy in their home. Hutton began singing on street corners, then got into vaudeville and fronting big bands in her teens.

In the late 1930s, she caught on with the orchestra of Vincent Lopez, who took a gander at her “rough and ready” technique and signed her on the spot. At the Carnival of Swing concert at Randalls Island in 1938, she drove the crowd wild with her rendition of “Who Stole the Jam?”

A year later, she left Lopez for the New York stage, making her Broadway debut in the revue “Two for the Show” (1940). Variety described her as “an adorable Easter chicken with a fluff of yellow hair.”

In later years, Hutton overcame her addictions, converted to Catholicism, and earned a liberal arts degree. She did interviews for documentaries, but said she never watched her old movies.