Eleanor Holm would never have become a celebrity beyond the sport of swimming, in which she was Olympic 100 metres backstroke champion in 1932, but for her excessive drinking while on the liner taking the US team to the Games in Berlin. So seriously did the American officials regard her misbehaviour that she was expelled from the team in an incident that brought widespread publicity, especially since sports journalists were among her drinking companions.

This notoriety and her unquestioned beauty combined to ensure her popularity in swimming carnivals at the New York World’s Fair in 1939-40 and she also appeared in a film, Tarzan’s Revenge, opposite Glenn Morris, the 1936 Olympic decathlon champion.

Despite her constant carousing in nightclubs, Holm was a hugely talented competitor, who became the first American to be selected for three Olympic swimming teams and was unbeaten for seven years in both the 100 and 200 metres backstroke, in which she also set world records.

She was born in Brooklyn and learnt to swim in a pool near her family’s summer home in Long Beach, New York. At the 1928 Games, she finished fifth in the 100 metres backstroke but she won the 1932 title by nearly two seconds in 1 minute 19.4 seconds.

Shortly after the Olympics, she met Art Jarrett, a bandleader, in Hollywood and married him in September 1933 in Beverly Hills. He had been a fellow student at Erasmus High School in Brooklyn. Holm then combined training with appearing in a nightclub routine with her husband’s band, singing I’m an Old Cowhand while wearing a white bathing suit, cowboy hat and high heels.

However, it was on the voyage to Europe in July 1936 that she suddenly attracted headlines, the American public not being used, at the time, to having the peccadillos of leading athletes disclosed. Two days after the SS Manhattan set sail, she was the only member of the American team to be invited to a party on the first class deck. She had to be helped back to her cabin at 6am.

According to the noted Olympic historian David Wallechinsky, when she was reprimanded by the US officials, she replied that she was “free, white and 22”. She continued to spend the trip drinking champagne and playing dice, and after she collapsed in her cabin the ship’s doctor pronounced that she was suffering from acute alcoholism. She was promptly expelled from the team, although she pleaded her case through a crack in the door of the cabin of Avery Brundage, the leader of the US delegation and later the autocratic president of the International Olympic Committee. Even a petition from more than 200 members of the team failed to move him.

There were compensations. As Holm later put it: “He rained on my parade for only a very short time. He did make me famous. I would have been just another female backstroke swimmer without Brundage.” In Berlin, she had a ghosted column published in American papers and attended receptions given by the Nazi leaders. Hermann Goering gave her a silver swastika from his uniform, and when she later married Billy Rose, who was Jewish, she had a mould made of it and put a diamond Star of David in the centre.

After her divorce from Jarrett, she lived luxuriously with Rose in Manhattan until they, in turn, split up in an acrimonious separation in 1954.

She subsequently married Tom Whalen, an oil executive and former American football player, and they retired to Miami. He died in 1984. They had no children.

Holm always kept her 1932 Olympic swimming costume near her but said: “I don’t drink champagne anymore. Just a little dry white wine.”

Eleanor Holm, swimmer, was born on December 6, 1913. She died on January 31, 2004, aged 90.