"Can't sing. Can't act. Slightly balding. Can dance a little." Fittingly, the studio toad who wrote that screen-test evaluation is long forgotten, but the greatest dancer in movie history is not. With his sister Adele, he danced his way from vaudeville to Broadway, where they starred in hit musicals for nearly 15 years (and reportedly appeared in a 1915 Mary Pickford movie, Fanchon the Cricket He played himself in Dancing Lady (1933), his first film; later that year, he was teamed with Ginger Rogers as the second leads in Flying Down to Rio where their footwork in "The Carioca" stole the show.
RKO quickly realized it had a potential gold mine, and over the next six years Astaire and Rogers made eight more films together, all of them a blend of astonishing choreography (usually in concert with Hermes Pan), brilliant songs by the likes of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Jerome Kern, eye-popping sets, and vintage comedy plots propelled by vintage comedy actors. Buffs all have their favorites, but Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936) are generally considered the best of the lot. (The others: The Gay Divorcee 1934; Roberta 1935; Follow the Fleet 1936; Shall We Dance? 1937; Carefree 1938; The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle 1939) Though worshipped as a dancer, in these and other films Astaire winningly introduced more enduring song hits than any other performer of his generation.
After Rogers broke up the team to concentrate on her acting, Astaire embarked on his "solo" career, giving full vent to his imaginative terpsichorean ideas, and dancing opposite-among others Eleanor Powell in Broadway Melody of 1940 Rita Hayworth in 1941's You'll Never Get Rich and You Were Never Lovelier Bing Crosby in 1942's Holiday Inn and 1946's Blue Skies Gene Kelly in 1946's Ziegfeld Follies Judy Garland in 1948's Easter Parade Jane Powell in 1951's Royal Wedding Cyd Charisse in 1953's The Band Wagon and 1957's Silk Stockings and Audrey Hepburn in 1957's Funny Face as well as reuniting with Rogers in The Barkleys of Broadway (1949).
With the passing of the studio musical, he produced and starred in three TV specials that remain landmarks of the medium. He also took a few straight acting roles in such films as On the Beach (1959), The Pleasure of His Company (1960), The Notorious Landlady (1962), The Towering Inferno (1974, which inex plicably earned him an Oscar nomination), and Ghost Story (1981), made one final musical, Finian's Rainbow (1968), and cohosted the two That's Entertainment! compilations (1974 and 1976), the second of which featured his last dancing on film-alongside compatriot Gene Kelly. Having won two Emmys for his musical specials, he added another for acting in the TV movie A Family Upside Down (1978). In any medium, he epitomized elegance and style. He never won an Academy Award for a specific performance, but did receive a special Oscar in 1949.
Personal Quotes
On modern movies: "They tend to overdo the vulgarity. I'm not embarrassed by the language itself, but it's embarrassing to be listening to it, sitting next to perfect strangers."
Ginger Rogers
To remember her only as the beautiful, vivacious dancing partner of Fred Astaire in their classic 1930s musicals is to do Ginger Rogers a great disfavor: She was a much better actress than most Hollywood wags gave her credit for, even before her Oscar win for Kitty Foyle (1940). Rogers was a performer from childhood, the product of an aggressive stage mother. She danced professionally in vaudeville while still in her teens, married to partner Jack Pepper at the age of 17. Her first film was Campus Sweethearts (1929), a short subject starring Rudy Vallee; she made several minimusicals in New York while performing in the Gershwin stage smash "Girl Crazy," in which she had the second female lead.
Paramount, at that time operating a stu dio in Astoria, Queens, gave Rogers a break in feature films, slotting her in the Claudette Colbert starrer Young Man of Manhattan (1930). She appeared in a few more minor films for the studio before going in 1931 to Hollywood, where she worked as leading lady in a slew of program pictures including The Tip Off, Suicide Fleet (both 1931), Carnival Boat, The Tenderfoot, Hat Check Girl, You Said a Mouthful, The Thirteenth Guest (all 1932), A Shriek in the Night, Broadway Bad, Don't Bet on Love, Sitting Pretty (introducing the song "Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?"), and Chance at Heaven (all 1933). Unlike many attractive young women in Hollywood, Rogers seldom played dewy-eyed ingenues; her characters were nearly always wisecracking, worldly dames who knew their apples.
The year 1933 provided Ginger with her best breaks to date. First, she won star billing for the first time at a major studio in RKO's Professional Sweetheart. Second, she won plum supporting roles in two Warner Bros. musicals, 42nd Street (as monocled "Anytime Annie") and Gold Diggers of 1933 (introducing the song "We're in the Money"-and singing one chorus in pig latin). Third, she was teamed with dancer Fred Astaire for the first time in Flying Down to Rio also for RKO, in which they danced to the lilting strains of the "Carioca."
RKO put Rogers under contract in 1934 (after she'd finished Twenty Million Sweethearts for Warners), developing a starring vehicle for her and Astaire. The Gay Divorcee sported songs by Cole Porter (including "Night and Day") and gave the Astaire-Rogers team plenty of opportunity to strut their stuff. The picture's overwhelming success kept the pair together in a series of delightful, lavishly mounted musicals, all of which featured songs by the country's top tunesmiths (Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins) and provided escapist entertainment for Depression-battered moviegoers. Rogers and Astaire were an incomparably well-matched team; as perceptive critics noticed, they seemed to make love through their dance routines, and their smart comic performances as on-again, off-again lovers were a treat. Rogers also made sure she always had one prime solo song in each film. Audiences loved Top Hat, Roberta (both 1935), Swing Time, Follow the Fleet (both 1936), Shall We Dance? (1937), Carefree (1938), and the more serious The Story of Vernon & Irene Castle (1939).
Although RKO allowed her to make films without Astaire-including Romance in Manhattan (1934), Star of Midnight (1935, opposite William Powell in this imitation Thin Man), In Person (1936), Stage Door (1937, in which she provided a lively and engaging counterpart to top-billed Katharine Hepburn), Vivacious Lady, Having Wonderful Time (both 1938), and Bachelor Mother (1939)-she felt she'd never blossom on her own without shedding her demanding dancing partner. For his part, Astaire had had enough of Rogers and the RKO musicals, and was more than willing to leave for greener pastures elsewhere.
After starring in two relatively minor films, Lucky Partners and The Primrose Path Rogers hit pay dirt by letting her blond hair go naturally dark and forgoing glamour-girl treatment to play the feisty, independent working girl in Kitty Foyle (all 1940), pleasantly surprising critics and audiences with her warm, impassioned performance. She won a Best Actress Academy Award, and solidified her position as RKO's top star.
Tom, Dick and Harry (1941) gave her a delightful romantic comedy vehicle. The following year, off the RKO lot, Rogers shined in Roxie Hart (playing a gumchomping, wisecracking publicity hound) and The Major and the Minor (as another high-spirited, self-reliant working girl, who disguises herself as a 12-year-old to save on train fare). By contrast, her RKO vehicles of the period, including Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942) and Tender Comrade (1943), seemed weak. Paramount's overproduced, Technicolor Lady in the Dark though, gave Rogers her first real flop, being the tale (based on a Moss Hart play-but shorn of most of its Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin songs) of a "boss lady" who undergoes psychoanalysis.
Rogers' star never again shone as brightly, even though she still retained the power to hold and satisfy audiences. Weekend at the Waldorf (1945), Heartbeat, Magnificent Doll (both 1946, miscast in the latter as Dolley Madison), It Had to Be You (1947), The Barkleys of Broadway (1949, reteamed one last time with Astaire, this time at MGM), Perfect Strangers (1950), the highly dramatic Storm Warning and The Groom Wore Spurs (both 1951) saw a gradual diminution in her popularity. She made something of a comeback with three 1952 comedies-We're Not Married, Dreamboat (playing a silent-screen star, a part for which she seemed too young), and Monkey Business-but she couldn't compete with a newer, younger group of stars such as Monkey Business's Marilyn Monroe.
Rogers gave tolerably good performances in Forever Female (1953), Black Widow (1954, as a temperamental actress), Tight Spot (1955), and The First Traveling Saleslady (1956), but found decent starring vehicles fewer and far between, and after Teenage Rebel (also 1956) and Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (1957), she returned to the stage and nightclubs. (Some years later, she played a madam opposite Ray Milland in 1964's mercifully unreleased The Confession/aka Quick, Let's Get Married/aka Seven Different Ways and was Carol Lynley's mother in 1965's Harlow.)
She remained a star, however, as she proved when she took over the leading role in the Broadway smash "Hello, Dolly!" in 1965, and played the title role in the 1969 London production of "Mame." Professionally inactive in her later years, she was confined to a wheelchair but still made myriad personal appearances, especially to promote her 1991 autobiography, "Ginger: My Story." (A 1942 juvenile novel, "Ginger Rogers and the Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak," was written by her mother Lela, who also worked for years as a talent scout and nurturer at RKO, and caused considerable ripples as a Communist witch-hunter in the 1950s.) Rogers was married to actors Lew Ayres (1934-41), Jacques Bergerac (1953-57), and William Marshall (1961-62).
Trivia
The first Rogers and Astaire teaming, Flying Down to Rio (1933), was her twentieth film appearance and only Fred's second.
In a 1991 TV interview when asked why the Astaire/Rogers union wasn't known as 'Ginger & Fred' rather than 'Fred & Ginger' (as Ginger had been in films longer), she replied, 'It's a man's world'.
Personal Quotes
'They're not going to get my money to see the junk that's made today' (1983)
"Hollywood is like an empty wastebasket."
"In everything that I do I learn and try to put it to use. I have learned to go through life not into it. It's like a boat. You mustn't let the water in or you're sunk. Of course, I've made mistakes and I have had failures, but I do not dwell on them because people don't care about garbage. When I make a mistake it's like a bad leaf on a lettuce - I throw it out into the waste basket."
"I don't care what the critics say. My fabulous mom will give me a good review if nobody else does."
[on her partnrship with Astaire] "After all, it's not as if we were Abbott and Costello. We did have careers apart from each other."
"The most important thing in anyone's life is to be giving something. The quality I can give is fun, joy and happiness. This is my gift."
