Buster Crabbe, a top swimmer of his day who went on to become a popular movie actor and successful businessman, died of a heart attack yesterday morning at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 75 years old.

Mr. Crabbe, who was named Clarence Linden Crabbe at his birth in Oakland, Calif., garnered 16 world and 35 national records during his career as a swimmer. He was a standout for the United States at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam and won the gold medal for the 400-meter freestyle event at the Olympics in Los Angeles four years later.

His success and rugged good looks led Hollywood to sign him on. A talent scout for Paramount Pictures picked 40 of the athletes at the Los Angeles games for screen tests, and Mr. Crabbe was the one of them to be put under contract.

He abandoned his plan to become a lawyer and went on to appear in about 180 films, on the screen and television. He starred in a series of space and adventure pictures in the 1930's and 40's that won him huge audiences, starting with the role of a Tarzan-like Lion Man in the 1933 film ''King of the Jungle.'' Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers

He was perhaps best known as the star of the old ''Flash Gordon'' and ''Buck Rogers'' pictures, and he also portrayed Captain Gallant of the French Foreign Legion and made one Tarzan film in 1933, ''Tarzan the Fearless.''

Off the movie set, he starred with Eleanor Holm in Billy Rose's Aquacade at the New York World's Fair in 1940 and later toured with his own Buster Crabbe's Aquacade here and in Europe.

At the time of his death, Mr. Crabbe was still active in business with Cascade Industries of New Jersey, maker of Buster Crabbe swimming pools.

He also spent much of his time traveling to lecture, chiefly on physical fitness but recently to boost the United States athletic team at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic. He also served on the organizing committee for those games. A Boy in Hawaii

Mr. Crabbe's family moved from California to Hawaii when he was 18 months old because his father, Edward, got a new job as overseer at a pineapple plantation. Young Clarence learned to swim at the age of 5 at Puna Hou High School in Honolulu. As a student, he won letters every year in football, basketball, track and swimming, for a total of 16.

He returned to the mainland to attend the University of Southern California, graduating with a bachelor's degree. He was a first-year law student at the university when he won a place on the American Olympic team.

The records he amassed over the years were broken long ago by both men and women swimmers. Mr. Crabbe himself recognized the greater prowess of today's athletes when compared to the more leisurely contests of his own time.

''In today's competitions,'' he said in 1979 at the age of 71, ''I couldn't even match the girls.'' Mr. Crabbe looked after his own investments and for a number of years after 1966 had been a member of the New York Stock Exchange. His longtime interest in physical fitness prompted him to write a book on calisthenics titled ''Energistics.'' Mr. Crabbe's survivors include his wife of 50 years, the former Adah Virginia Held; a daughter, Susan Ann Crabbe Fletcher; a son, Cullen Crabbe, and seven grandchildren.