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Fred Astaire (May 10, 1899 – June 22, 1987), born Frederick Austerlitz in Omaha, Nebraska, was an American film and Broadway stage dancer, choreographer, singer and actor. He is particularly associated with Ginger Rogers, with whom he made ten films.

His unparalleled skill as a dancer has led many critics to cite him as the best dancer ever to come out of Hollywood.

Early life and career

His father was an Austrian immigrant and a Catholic, though the family originally has Jewish roots; his mother was born in the U.S. to Lutheran German parents; Astaire became an Episcopalian during his youth. [http://german.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.germanhollywood.com/astaire.html

Astaire was a name taken by him and his sister Adele Astaire for their vaudeville act when they were about 5 years old. It is said to have come from an uncle surnamed "L'Astaire". Many sources state that the Astaire siblings appeared in a 1915 film entitled Fanchon, the Cricket, starring Mary Pickford, but this is uncorroborated.

During the 1920s, Fred and Adele appeared on Broadway and on the London stage in shows such as Lady Be Good, Funny Face and The Band Wagon, winning popular acclaim with the theater crowd on both sides of the Atlantic. They split in 1932, when Adele married her first husband, Lord Charles Cavendish, a son of the Duke of Devonshire. Fred went on to achieve success on his own on Broadway and in London with Gay Divorce, while considering offers from Hollywood.

According to Hollywood folklore, an RKO Pictures screen test report on Astaire, now lost along with the test, is supposed to have read: "Can't sing. Can't act. Balding. Can dance a little." The producer of the Astaire-Rogers pictures Pandro S. Berman claimed he had never heard it in the 1930s and that it only emerged years later. Astaire, in a 1980 interview on ABC's 20/20 with Barbara Walters, insisted that the report had actually read: "Can't act. Slightly bald. Also dances". However the test was clearly disappointing and in a 1933 studio memo David O. Selznick, who had signed Astaire to RKO and commissioned the test, described it as "wretched". In any event, the test report did not affect RKO's plans for Astaire, first loaning him out for a few days to MGM in 1933 for his Hollywood debut, where he appeared as himself dancing with Joan Crawford in the successful musical film Dancing Lady.

Rogers and Astaire

On his return to RKO Pictures he took fifth billing alongside Ginger Rogers in the 1933 Dolores Del Rio vehicle Flying Down to Rio. In a review, Variety magazine attributed its massive success to Astaire's presence: "The main point of Flying Down to Rio is the screen promise of Fred Astaire.... He's assuredly a bet after this one, for he's distinctly likeable on the screen, the mike is kind to his voice and as a dancer he remains in a class by himself. The latter observation will be no news to the professsion, which has long admitted that Astaire starts dancing where the others stop hoofing". Although Astaire was initially very reluctant to become part of another dancing team, he was persuaded by the obvious public appeal of the Astaire-Rogers pairing and he went on to make a total of ten musical films with Ginger Rogers.

That partnership, and the choreography of Astaire and Hermes Pan, helped make dancing an important element of the Hollywood film musical. The Astaire-Rogers series are among the top films of the 1930s. They include The Gay Divorcee (1934), Roberta (1935), Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), Swing Time (1936), Shall We Dance (1937), and Carefree (1938). Their partnership elevated them both to stardom: as Katharine Hepburn reportedly said, "He gives her class and she gives him sex".*.

Astaire is credited with two important innovations in early film musicals. First, his insistence that the (almost stationary) camera film a dance routine in a single shot, if possible, while holding the dancers in full view at all times - a policy Astaire maintained from The Gay Divorcee (1934) onwards, until he was overruled by Francis Ford Coppola - who also fired Hermes Pan - when directing Finian's Rainbow (1968). He famously quipped: "Either the camera will dance, or I will". Second, he was adamant that all song and dance routines be seamlessly integrated into the plotlines of the film. Typically, an Astaire picture would include a solo performance by Astaire - which he termed his "sock solo", a partnered comedy dance routine and a partnered romantic dance routine.

Dance commentators Arlene Croce and John Mueller consider Rogers to have been Astaire's greatest dance partner, while recognizing that later partners such as Rita Hayworth, Cyd Charisse, Vera Ellen, and Eleanor Powell displayed superior technical dance skills. Mueller sums up Rogers' abilities as follows: "Rogers was outstanding among Astaire's partners not because she was superior to others as a dancer but because, as a skilled, intuitive actress, she was cagey enough to realize that acting did not stop when dancing began...the reason so many women have fantasized about dancing with Fred Astaire is that Ginger Rogers conveyed the impression that dancing with him is the most thrilling experience imaginable". Other historians counter that Rogers is just his best-remembered partner, because she made more films with Astaire than anyone else, and that Astaire was equally creative with later partners. According to Astaire "Ginger had never danced with a partner before. She faked it an awful lot. She couldn't tap and she couldn't do this and that...But Ginger had style and talent and improved as she went along. She got so that after a while everyone else who danced with me looked wrong." However, Astaire was still unwilling to have his career tied exclusively to any partnership, having already been linked to his sister Adele on stage. He even negotiated with RKO to strike out on his own with A Damsel in Distress in 1937, unsuccessfully as it turned out. He returned to make two more films with Rogers, Carefree and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle and, when both lost money, Astaire left RKO, while Rogers remained and went on to become the studio's hottest property in the early forties. They were reunited in 1949 for their tenth and final outing in The Barkleys of Broadway.

Dancing and singing prowess

See also: Fred Astaire's Solo and Partnered Dances

Astaire was a virtuoso dancer, able to convey lighthearted adventuresomeness or deep emotion when called for. His technical control and sense of rhythm were astonishing; according to one anecdote, he was able, when called back to the studio to redo a dance number he had filmed several weeks earlier for a special effects number, to reproduce the routine with pinpoint accuracy, down to the last gesture. Astaire's execution of a dance routine was prized for its elegance, grace, originality and precision. He drew from a variety of influences, including tap and other African-American rhythms, classical dance and the elevated style of Vernon and Irene Castle, to create a uniquely recognisable dance style which greatly influenced the American Smooth style of ballroom dance, and set standards against which subsequent filmed dance musicals would be judged. He choreographed all his own routines, usually with the assistance of other choreographers, primarily Hermes Pan.

His perfectionism was legendary as was his modesty and consideration towards his fellow artists; however, his relentless insistence on rehearsals and retakes was a burden to some. Although he viewed himself as an entertainer first and foremost, his consummate artistry won him the adulation of such 20th century dance legends as George Balanchine, the Nicholas Brothers, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Margot Fonteyn, Bob Fosse, Gregory Hines, Gene Kelly, Rudolph Nureyev, and Bill Robinson.

Always modest about his singing abilities, Astaire is considered by some to have introduced more standards from the Great American Songbook than any other singer, and the leading composers / lyricists of his day wrote songs especially for him: "Night and Day", "Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails", "Cheek to Cheek", "Let's Face the Music and Dance", "The Way You Look Tonight", "A Fine Romance", "Never Gonna Dance", "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off", "They Can't Take that Away from Me", "A Foggy Day in London Town", "Change Partners", "So Near and Yet So Far", "Dearly Beloved", "You Were Never Lovelier", "One For My Baby", "This Heart of Mine", "Something's Gotta Give", "That's Entertainment!", "S'Wonderful", and countless others. Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Harry Warren, Johnny Mercer and the Gershwins all contributed classic songs for his musicals, in large part because of his sincere, unmannered delivery of their songs.

Other teamings

Now on his own, Astaire teamed up with other stars, notably with Bing Crosby in Holiday Inn (1942) and Blue Skies (1946). He was almost outdanced in Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940) by one of his first post-Rogers dance partners, Eleanor Powell. Other partners during this period included Paulette Goddard in Second Chorus (1940), Rita Hayworth in You'll Never Get Rich (1941) and You Were Never Lovelier (1942), Joan Leslie in The Sky's the Limit (1943), and Lucille Bremer in Yolanda and the Thief (1945) and Ziegfeld Follies (1946). Ziegfeld Follies also contains a memorable teaming of Astaire with Gene Kelly.

After announcing his retirement with Blue Skies in 1946, Astaire soon returned to the big screen to replace the injured Gene Kelly in Easter Parade (1948) opposite Judy Garland, and for a final reunion with Rogers, The Barkleys of Broadway (1949). He then went on to make more musicals throughout the 1950s: Let's Dance (1950) with Betty Hutton, Royal Wedding (1951) with Jane Powell, Three Little Words (1950) and The Belle of New York (1952) with Vera Ellen, The Band Wagon (1953) and Silk Stockings (1957) with Cyd Charisse, Daddy Long Legs (1955) with Leslie Caron, and Funny Face (1957) with Audrey Hepburn. His legacy at this point was thirty musicals in a twenty-five year period. Afterwards, Astaire announced that he was retiring from dancing in film to concentrate on dramatic acting, scoring rave reviews for the nuclear war drama On the Beach (1959).

Later career

Astaire did not give up dancing completely, and made a series of highly-rated specials for television into the early 1960s, each featuring Barrie Chase with whom Astaire enjoyed an Indian summer of dance creativity. One of these programs, 1958's An Evening with Fred Astaire, won nine Emmy Awards, including "Best Single Performance by an Actor" and "Most Outstanding Single Program of the Year." It was also noteworthy for being the first major broadcast to be prerecorded on color videotape.

Astaire's final musical film was Finian's Rainbow (1968), in which he shed his white tie and tails to play an Irish rogue who believes if he buries a crock of gold in the shadows of Fort Knox it will multiply. His last on-screen dance partner was Petula Clark, who portrayed his skeptical daughter. He admitted to being as nervous about singing with her as she confessed to being apprehensive about dancing with him.

Astaire continued to act into the 1970s, appearing in films such as The Towering Inferno (1974) for which he received his only Academy Award nomination in the category of Best Supporting Actor. He appeared in the first two That's Entertainment! documentaries in the mid-1970s, in the second performing a song-and-dance routine with Gene Kelly. In 1976, he recorded a disco-styled rendition of Carly Simon's "Attitude Dancing". In 1978, Fred Astaire co-starred with Helen Hayes in a well-received television film, A Family Upside Down, in which they play an elderly couple coping with failing health. Astaire won an Emmy Award for his performance. He made a well-publicized guest appearance on the science fiction TV series Battlestar Galactica in 1979. His final film was the 1981 adaptation of Peter Straub's Ghost Story.

He received an honorary Academy Award in 1950 "for his unique artistry and his contributions to the technique of musical pictures." He also won Emmys in 1961 and 1978.

He received Kennedy Center Honors in 1978, the first year they were awarded. The American Film Institute awarded him their "Lifetime Achievement Award" for 1981.

Always immaculately turned out, he remained something of a male fashion icon even in his later years, eschewing his trademark top hat, white tie and tails (which he always despised) in favour of a breezy casual style of tailored sports jackets, coloured shirts, cravates and slacks - the latter usually held up by the idiosyncratic use of an old tie in place of a belt.

Personal life

Astaire married for the first time in 1933, to Phyllis Potter (née Phyllis Livingston Baker, 1908-1954), a Boston-born New York socialite and former wife of Eliphalet Nott Potter III (1906-1981). In addition to Phyllis's son, Eliphalet IV, known as Peter, the Astaires had two children, Fred Jr. (born 1936, he appeared with his father in the movie Midas Run but became a charter pilot and rancher instead of an actor), and Ava, Mrs. Richard McKenzie (born 1942).

Astaire, a lifelong horse-racing enthusiast, married again in 1980, to Robyn Smith, an actress turned champion jockey. She was nearly 50 years his junior. It is uncertain whether the second Mrs. Astaire was born Robin Miller in 1944 or Melody Palm in 1942.

Astaire made headlines again at age 80 when it was widely reported that he was hospitalized after breaking either his arm, wrist, or hip, depending upon the account, while riding a skateboard. It was much later revealed that he fell in the tub.

Fred Astaire died in 1987 from pneumonia at the age of 88, and was interred in the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California. One last request of his was to thank his fans for their years of support.

Trivia

Fred Astaire is biographical entry number 00000001 at the Internet Movie Database.

At the time of filming Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Fred has expressed desire on playing the part of Willy Wonka, but was turned down because he was too old for the role.

Taking Back Sunday has a song called "I Am Fred Astaire" on their album Where You Want to Be.

Lucky Boys Confusion has a song called "Fred Astaire"

Filmography

(*) w/ Ginger Rogers

Television Work

External links

References

Fred Astaire: Steps in Time, 1959, multiple reprints.

Stanley Green, Burt Goldblatt: Starring Fred Astaire, Dodd 1973, IBSN 0396068774

Arlene Croce: The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, Galahad Books 1974, ISBN 0883650991

John Mueller: Astaire Dancing - The Musical Films of Fred Astaire, Knopf 1985, ISBN 0394516540

Larry Billman: Fred Astaire - A Bio-bibliography, Greenwood Press 1997, ISBN 0313290105

G. Bruce Boyer: Fred Astaire Style, Assouline 2005, ISBN 2843236770

The Astaire Family Papers, The Howard Gotleib Archival Research Center, Boston University, MA, U.S.A.

Fred Astaire | 1899 births | 1987 deaths | Academy Awards hosts | Actor-singers | American dancers | American film actors | Austrian-Americans | Ballroom dancers | Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nominees | MGM musical actors, singers and dancers | Entertainers who died in their 80s | American Episcopalians | German-Americans | Omahans | People from Nebraska | Tap dancers | Vaudeville performers | Academy Honorary Award recipients | Film actors

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