Cole Porter was born June 9, 1891, at Peru, Indiana, the son of pharmacist Samuel Fenwick Porter and Kate Cole. Cole was raised on a 750-acre fruit ranch. Kate Cole married Samuel Porter in 1884 and had two children, Louis and Rachel, who both died in infancy. Porter's grandfather, J.G. Cole, was a multi-millionaire who made his fortune in the coal and western timber business. His mother introduced him to the violin and the piano. Cole started riding horses at age six and began to studying piano at eight at Indiana's Marion Conservatory. By age ten, he had begun to compose songs, and his first song was entitled "Song of the Birds". He attended Worcester Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905, an elite private school from which he graduated in 1909 as class valedictorian. That summer he toured Europe as a graduation present from his grandfather. That fall, he entered Yale University and lived in a single room at Garland's Lodging House at 242 York Street in New Haven, CT, and became a member of the Freshman Glee Club. In 1910, he published his first song, "Bridget McGuire". While at Yale, he wrote football fight songs including the "Yale Bulldog Song" and "Bingo Eli Yale," which was introduced at a Yale dining hall dinner concert. Classmates include poet 'Archibald Macleish' (qv), Bill Crocker of San Francisco banking family and actor 'Monty Woolley' (qv). 'Dean Acheson (I)' (qv), later to be U.S. Secretary of State, lived in the same dorm with Porter and was a good friend of Porter. In his senior year he was president of the University Glee club and a football cheerleader. Porter graduated from Yale in 1913 with a BA degree. He attended Harvard Law school from 1913 to 1914 and the Harvard School of Music from 1915 to 1916. In 1917 he went to France and distributed foodstuffs to war-ravaged villages. In April 1918 he joined the 32nd Field Artillery Regiment and worked with the Bureau of the Military Attache of the US. During this time he met the woman who would become his wife, Linda Lee Thomas, a wealthy Kentucky divorcée, at a breakfast reception at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. He did not, as is often rumored, join the French Foreign Legion at this time, nor receive a commission in the French army and see combat as an officer. In 1919 he rented an apartment in Paris, enrolled in a school specializing in music composition and studied with Vincent D'indy. On December 18, 1919, married Linda Lee Thomas, honeymooning in the south of France. This was a "professional" marriage, as Cole was, in fact, gay. Linda had been previously married to a newspaper publisher and was described as a beautiful woman who was one of the most celebrated hostesses in Europe. The Porters made their home on the Rue Monsieur in Paris, where their parties were renowned as long and brilliant. They hired the Monte Carlo Ballet for one of their affairs; once, on a whim, they transported all of their guests to the French Riviera. In 1923 they moved to Venice, Italy, where they lived in the Rezzonico Palace, the former home of poets 'Elizabeth Barrett Browning' (qv) and 'Robert Browning (I)' (qv). They built an extravagant floating night club that would accommodate up to 100 guests. They conducted elaborate games including treasure hunts through the canals and arranged spectacular balls. Porter's first play on Broadway featured a former ballet dancer, actor 'Clifton Webb' (qv). He collaborated with 'E. Ray Goetz' (qv), the brother-in-law of 'Irving Berlin (I)' (qv), on several Broadway plays, as Goetz was an established producer and lyricist. His ballad "Love For Sale" was introduced on December 8, 1930, in a revue that starred 'Jimmy Durante (I)' (qv) and was introduced by 'Kathryn Crawford (I)' (qv). 'Walter Winchell' (qv), the newspaper columnist and radio personality, promoted the song, which was later banned by many radio stations because of its content. In 1934, his hit "Anything Goes" appeared on Broadway. During the show's hectic rehearsal Porter once asked the stage doorman what he thought the show should be called. The doorman responded that nothing seemed to go right, with so many things being taken out and then put back in, that "Anything Goes" might be a good title. Porter liked it, and kept it. In 1936, while preparing for "Red, Hot and Blue" with 'Bob Hope (I)' (qv) and 'Jimmy Durante (I)' (qv), 'Ethel Merman' (qv) was hired to do stenographic work to help Porter in rewriting scripts of the show. He later said she was the best stenographers he ever had. Porter wrote such classic songs as "Let's Do It" in 1928, "You Do Something To Me" in 1929, "Love For Sale" in 1930, "What Is This Thing Called Love?" in 1929, "Night and Day" in 1932, "I Get A Kick Out Of You" in 1934, "Begin the Beguine" in 1935, "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" in 1938, "Don't Fence Me In" in 1944, "I Love Paris" in 1953, "I've Got You Under My Skin", In the Still of The Night", "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To", "True Love", "Just One Of Those Things", "Anything Goes", "From This Moment On", "You're The Top", "Easy to Love" and many, many more. On October 24, 1937, taking a break from a re-write of what would be his weakest musical, "You Never Know", visiting as a guest at a countess' home, Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York, he was badly injured in a fall while horseback-riding. Both of his legs were smashed and he suffered a nerve injury. He was hospitalized for two years, confined to a wheelchair for five years and endured over 30 operations to save his legs over the next 20 years. During his recuperation he wrote a number of Broadway musicals. On August 3, 1952, his beloved mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage. His wife, Linda, died of cancer on May 20, 1954. On April 3, 1958, he sustained his 33rd operation, and still suffering from chronic pain, his right leg was amputated. He refused to wear an artificial limb and lived as a virtual recluse in his apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. He sought refuge in alcohol, sleep, self-pity and sank into despair. He even refused to attend a "Salute to Cole Porter" at the Metropolitan Opera on May 15, 1960, and the commencement exercises at Yale University in June of 1960 when he was conferred with an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, or his 70th birthday party arranged by his friends at the Orpheum Theater in New York City in June 1962. After what appeared to be a successful kidney stone operation at St. John's hospital in Santa Monica, California, he died very unexpectedly on October 15, 1964. His funeral instructions were that he have no funeral or memorial service and he was buried adjacent to his mother and wife in Peru, Indiana.
name | Cole Porter |
---|---|
birth date | June 09, 1891 |
birth place | Peru, Indiana, U.S. |
death date | October 15, 1964 |
death place | Santa Monica, California, U.S. |
spouse | (her death) |
domesticpartner | }} |
Cole Albert Porter (June 9, 1891 – October 15, 1964) was an American composer and songwriter. Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, he defied the wishes of his domineering grandfather and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn towards musical theatre. After a slow start, he began to achieve success in the 1920s, and by the 1930s he was one of the major songwriters for the Broadway musical stage. Unlike most successful Broadway composers, Porter wrote both the lyrics and the music for his songs.
After a serious horseback riding accident in 1937, Porter was left disabled and in constant pain, but he continued to work. His shows of the early 1940s did not contain the lasting hits of his best work of the 1920s and 30s, but in 1947 he made a triumphant comeback with his most successful musical, ''Kiss Me, Kate''.
Porter's other musicals include ''Fifty Million Frenchmen'', ''DuBarry Was a Lady'', ''Anything Goes'' and ''Can-Can'', and his numerous hit songs include "Night and Day", "I Get a Kick out of You", "Well, Did You Evah!" and "I've Got You Under My Skin". He also composed scores for films from the 1930s to the 1950s. He was noted for his sophisticated, suggestive lyrics, clever rhymes and complex forms.
J. O. Cole wanted his grandson to become a lawyer, and with that career in mind, he sent him to Worcester Academy in 1905. He became class valedictorian and was rewarded by his grandfather with a tour of France, Switzerland and Germany. After this he attended Yale University beginning in 1909, where he was a member of Scroll and Key and Delta Kappa Epsilon (Phi chapter) and sang both in the Yale Glee Club, of which he was elected president his senior year, and in the original line-up of the Whiffenpoofs. While at Yale, he wrote a number of student songs, including the football fight songs "Bulldog Bulldog" and "Bingo Eli Yale" (aka "Bingo, That's The Lingo!") that are still played at Yale today. Porter wrote 300 songs while at Yale. After graduating from Yale, Porter studied at Harvard Law School in 1913 (where he roomed with Dean Acheson). He soon felt that he was not destined to be a lawyer, and, at the suggestion of the dean of the law school, Porter switched to Harvard's music faculty, where he studied harmony and counterpoint with Pietro Yon. Kate Porter did not object to this move, but it was kept secret from J. O. Cole.
In 1915, Porter's first song on Broadway, "Esmeralda", appeared in the revue ''Hands Up''. The quick success was immediately followed by failure: his first Broadway production, in 1916, ''See America First'', a "patriotic comic opera" modeled on Gilbert and Sullivan, with a book by T. Lawrason Riggs, was a flop, closing after two weeks.
Porter maintained a luxury apartment in Paris, where he entertained lavishly. His parties were extravagant and scandalous, with "much gay and bisexual activity, Italian nobility, cross-dressing, international musicians, and a large surplus of recreational drugs." In 1918, he met Linda Lee Thomas, a rich, Louisville, Kentucky-born divorcée eight years his senior, whom he married the following year. She was in no doubt about Porter's homosexuality, but it was mutually advantageous for them to marry: for Linda it offered continued social status and a partner who was the antithesis of her abusive first husband; for Porter it brought a respectable heterosexual front in an era when homosexuality was not publicly acknowledged. They were, moreover, genuinely devoted to each other and remained married from December 19, 1919 until Linda's death in 1954. Linda remained protective of her social position, and believing that classical music might be a more prestigious outlet than Broadway for her husband's talents, she tried to use her connections to find him suitable teachers, including Igor Stravinsky, but was unsuccessful. Finally, Porter enrolled at the Schola Cantorum in Paris where he studied orchestration and counterpoint with Vincent d'Indy. Meanwhile, Porter's first big hit was the song "Old-Fashioned Garden" from the revue ''Hitchy-Koo'' in 1919. In 1920, he contributed the music of several songs to the musical ''A Night Out''.
Marriage did not diminish Porter's taste for extravagant luxury. The Porter home on the rue Monsieur near Les Invalides was a palatial house with platinum wallpaper and chairs upholstered in zebra skin. In 1923, Porter came into an inheritance from his grandfather, and he began renting Venetian palaces. He once hired the entire Ballets Russes to entertain his house guests, and for a party at Ca' Rezzonico, which he rented for $4,000 a month ($}} in current value), he hired 50 gondoliers to act as footmen and had a troupe of tight-rope walkers perform in a blaze of lights.
Porter received few commissions for songs in the years immediately after his marriage. He had the occasional number interpolated into other writers' revues in England and the U.S. For a C. B. Cochran show in 1921, he had two successes with the comedy numbers "The Blue Boy Blues" and "Olga, Come Back to the Volga". In 1923, in collaboration with Gerald Murphy, he composed a short ballet, originally titled ''Landed'' and then ''Within the Quota'', satirically depicting the adventures of an immigrant to America who becomes a film star. The work, written for the Swedish Ballet company, lasts about 16 minutes. It was orchestrated by Charles Koechlin and shared the same opening night as Milhaud's ''La création du monde''. Porter's work was one of the earliest symphonic jazz-based compositions, predating George Gershwin's ''Rhapsody in Blue'' by four months, and well received by both French and American reviewers after its premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in October 1923. After a successful New York performance the following month, the Swedish Ballet company toured the work in the U.S., performing it 69 times. A year later the company disbanded, and the score was lost until it was reconstructed from Porter's and Koechlin's manuscripts between 1966 and 1990, with help from Milhaud among others. Porter had less success with his work on ''Greenwich Village Follies'' (1924). He wrote most of the original score, but his songs were gradually dropped during the Broadway run, and by the time of the post-Broadway tour in 1925, all his numbers had been deleted.
Porter's new fame brought him offers from Hollywood, but as his score for Paramount's ''The Battle of Paris'' was undistinguished, and its star, Gertrude Lawrence, was miscast, the film was not a success. Citron expresses the view that Porter was not interested in cinema and "noticeably wrote down for the movies." Still on a Gallic theme, Porter's last Broadway show of the 1920s was ''Fifty Million Frenchmen'' (1929), for which he wrote 28 numbers, including "You Do Something to Me", "You've Got That Thing" and "The Tale of the Oyster". The show received mixed notices. One critic wrote, "the lyrics alone are enough to drive anyone but P.G. Wodehouse into retirement", but others dismissed the songs as "pleasant" and "not an outstanding hit song in the show". As it was a lavish and expensive production, nothing less than full houses would suffice, and after only three weeks the producers announced that they would close it. Irving Berlin, who was an admirer and champion of Porter, took out a paid press advertisement calling the show "The best musical comedy I've heard in years. ... One of the best collections of song numbers I have ever listened to". This saved the show, which ran for 254 performances, considered a successful run at the time.
Next came Fred Astaire's last stage show, ''Gay Divorce'' (1932). It featured a hit that became Porter's best-known song, "Night and Day". Despite mixed press (some critics were reluctant to accept Astaire without his previous partner, his sister Adele), the show ran for a profitable 248 performances, and the film rights were sold to RKO Pictures. Porter followed this with a West End show for Gertrude Lawrence, ''Nymph Errant'' (1933), presented by Cochran at the Adelphi Theatre, where it ran for 154 performances. Among the hit songs Porter composed for the show were "Experiment" and "The Physician" for Lawrence, and "Solomon" for Elizabeth Welch.
In 1934, producer Vinton Freedley came up with a new approach to producing musicals. Instead of commissioning book, music and lyrics and then casting the show, Freedley sought to create an ideal musical with stars and writers all engaged from the outset. The stars he wanted were Ethel Merman, William Gaxton and comedian Victor Moore. He planned a story around a shipwreck and a desert island, and for the book he turned to P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. For the songs, he decided on Porter. By dint of telling each of these that he had already signed the others, Freedley gathered his ideal team together. A drastic last-minute rewrite was necessitated by a major shipping accident, which dominated the news and made Bolton and Wodehouse's book seem tasteless. Nevertheless, the show, ''Anything Goes'', was an immediate hit. Porter wrote what is thought by many to be his greatest score of this period. ''The New Yorker'' magazine said, "Mr. Porter is in class by himself", and Porter himself subsequently called it one of his two perfect shows, along with the later ''Kiss Me, Kate''. Its songs include "I Get a Kick out of You", "All Through the Night", "You're the Top" (one of his best-known list songs), and "Blow, Gabriel, Blow", as well as the title number. The show ran for 420 performances in New York (a particularly long run in the 1930s) and 261 in London. Porter, despite his lessons in orchestration from d'Indy, did not orchestrate his musicals. ''Anything Goes'' was orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett and Hans Spialek. Now at the height of his success, Porter was able to enjoy the opening night of his musicals; he would make a grand entrance and sit in front, apparently relishing the show as much as any audience member. Russell Crouse commented, "Cole's opening-night behaviour is as indecent as that of a bridegroom who has a good time at his own wedding."
''Anything Goes'' was the first of five Porter shows featuring Merman. He loved her loud, brassy voice and wrote many numbers that featured her strengths. ''Jubilee'' (1935), written with Moss Hart while on a cruise around the world, was not a major hit, running for only 169 performances, but it featured two songs that have since become standards, "Begin the Beguine" and "Just One of Those Things". ''Red Hot And Blue'' (1936), featuring Merman, Jimmy Durante and Bob Hope, ran for 183 performances and introduced "It's De-Lovely", "Down in the Depths (on the Ninetieth Floor)", and "Ridin' High". The relative failure of these shows convinced Porter that his songs did not appeal to a broad enough audience. In an interview he said, "Sophisticated allusions are good for about six weeks ... more fun, but only for myself and about eighteen other people, all of whom are first-nighters anyway. Polished, urbane and adult playwriting in the musical field is strictly a creative luxury."
Porter also wrote for Hollywood in the mid-1930s. His scores include those for ''Born to Dance'' (1936), featuring "You'd Be So Easy to Love" and "I've Got You Under My Skin", and ''Rosalie'' (1937), featuring "In the Still of the Night". In addition, he composed the cowboy song "Don't Fence Me In" for an unproduced movie in the 1930s, but it did not become a hit until Roy Rogers and Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters, as well as other artists, introduced it to the public in the 1940s. The Porters took up residence in Hollywood in December 1935, but Linda did not like the movie environment, and Porter's homosexual peccadillos, hitherto very discreet, became less so, and she retreated to their Paris house. When his film assignment was finished, Porter hastened to Paris to make his peace with Linda, but she remained cool. They were shortly brought back together by a terrible accident suffered by Porter.
On October 24, 1937, Porter was riding with Countess Edith di Zoppola and Duke de Verdura at Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York, when his horse rolled on him and crushed his legs, leaving him substantially crippled and in constant pain for the rest of his life. Though doctors told Porter's wife and mother that his right leg would have to be amputated, and possibly the left one as well, he refused to have the procedure. Linda rushed from Paris to be with him, and supported him in his refusal of amputation. He remained in the hospital for seven months and was then allowed to go home to his apartment at the Waldorf Towers. He resumed work as soon as he could, finding it took his mind off his perpetual pain.
Porter's first show after his accident was not a success. ''You Never Know'' (1938), starring Clifton Webb, Lupe Vélez and Libby Holman, ran for only 78 performances. The score included the songs, "From Alpha to Omega" and "At Long Last Love". He returned to success with ''Leave It to Me!'' (1938); the show introduced Mary Martin, singing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy", and other numbers included "Most Gentlemen Don't Like Love" and "From Now On". Porter's last show of the 1930s was ''DuBarry Was a Lady'' (1939), a particularly risqué show, starring Merman and Bert Lahr. After a pre-Broadway tour, during which it ran into trouble with the Boston censors, it ran for 408 performances, beginning at the 46th Street Theatre. The score included "But in the Morning, No" (which was banned from the airwaves), "Do I Love You?", "Well, Did You Evah!", "Katie Went to Haiti" and another of Porter's up-tempo list songs, "Friendship". At the end of 1939, Porter contributed six songs to the film ''Broadway Melody of 1940'' for Fred Astaire, George Murphy and Eleanor Powell.
In between his Broadway shows of the 1940s, Porter again wrote for Hollywood. His film scores of this period were ''You'll Never Get Rich'' (1941) with Astaire and Rita Hayworth, ''Something to Shout About'' (1943) with Don Ameche, Janet Blair and William Gaxton, and ''Mississippi Belle'' (1943–44), which was abandoned before filming began. He also cooperated in the making of the film ''Night and Day'' (1946), a largely fictional biography of Porter, with Cary Grant implausibly cast in the lead. The critics scoffed, but the film was a huge success, chiefly because of the wealth of vintage Porter numbers in it. The success of the biopic contrasted severely with the failure of Vincente Minnelli's film ''The Pirate'', in 1948, in which five new Porter songs received little attention.
From this low spot, Porter made a conspicuous comeback, in 1948, with ''Kiss Me, Kate''. It was by far his most successful show, running for 1,077 performances in New York and 400 in London. The production won the Tony Award for best musical (the first Tony awarded in that category), and Porter won for best composer and lyricist. The score includes "Another Op'nin', Another Show", "Wunderbar", "So In Love", "We Open in Venice", "Tom, Dick or Harry", "I've Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua", "Too Darn Hot", "Always True to You (in My Fashion)", and "Brush Up Your Shakespeare".
Porter began the 1950s with ''Out Of This World'' (1950), which had some good numbers but too much camp and vulgarity, and was not greatly successful. His next show, ''Can-Can'' (1952), featuring "C'est Magnifique" and "It's All Right with Me", was another hit, running for 892 performances. Porter's last original Broadway production, ''Silk Stockings'' (1955), featuring "All of You", was also successful, with a run of 477 performances. The film ''High Society'' (1956), starring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly, had Porter's last major hit song, "True Love". The film was later adapted as a stage musical of the same name. Porter wrote numbers for the film ''Les Girls'' (1957) with Gene Kelly. His final score was for a CBS television color special, ''Aladdin'' (1958).
Judy Garland performed a medley of Porter's songs at the 37th Academy Awards, the first Oscars ceremony held following Porter's death. In contrast with the highly embroidered and sanitized screen biography in ''Night and Day,'' his life was chronicled more realistically in ''De-Lovely'', a 2004 Irwin Winkler film starring Kevin Kline as Porter and Ashley Judd as Linda. In 1980, Porter's music was used for the score of ''Happy New Year'', based on the Philip Barry play ''Holiday''. The Cole Porter Festival is held every year during the second weekend of June in his hometown of Peru, Indiana. The festival fosters music and art appreciation by celebrating Porter's life and music. In December 2010, his portrait was added to the Hoosier Heritage Gallery in the office of the Governor of Indiana. Porter appears as a character in Woody Allen's 2011 film ''Midnight in Paris''.
Singers who have paid tribute to Porter in their work include the Swedish pop group Gyllene Tider, which recorded a song called Flickan i en Cole Porter-sång ''(That girl from the Cole Porter song)'' in 1982. In country singer Jo Dee Messina's song "These Are the Days", the protagonist reveals that she sings old Cole Porter songs. He is referenced in the song "The Call of the Wild" (Merengue) by David Byrne on his 1989 album ''Rei Momo''. He is also mentioned in the song "Tonite It Shows" by Mercury Rev on their 1998 album ''Deserter's Songs''. At halftime of the 1991 Orange Bowl between Colorado and Notre Dame, Joel Grey led a large cast of singers and dancers in a tribute to Porter marking the one hundredth anniversary of his birth. The program was called, "You'll Get a Kick Out of Cole".
Porter was a Steinway artist, performing exclusively on Steinway pianos. His own Steinway piano is currently in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City.
Shows listed are stage musicals unless otherwise noted. Where the show was later made into a film, the year refers to the stage version. A complete list of Porter's works is in the Library of Congress (see also the Cole Porter Collection).
A far more comprehensive list of Cole Porter songs, along with their date of composition and original show, is available online at the "Cole Porter Songlist Page".
Category:1891 births Category:1964 deaths Category:Songwriters from Indiana Category:American film score composers Category:American musical theatre composers Category:American musical theatre lyricists Category:Musicians from Indiana Category:Deaths from renal failure Category:Grammy Award winners Category:LGBT composers Category:LGBT musicians from the United States Category:People from Peru, Indiana Category:People from Santa Monica, California Category:American amputees Category:Schola Cantorum de Paris alumni Category:Scroll and Key Category:Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Category:Worcester Academy alumni Category:Yale University alumni Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Soldiers of the French Foreign Legion
ar:كول بورتر ca:Cole Porter cs:Cole Porter da:Cole Porter de:Cole Porter es:Cole Porter fa:کول پورتر fr:Cole Porter hr:Cole Porter io:Cole Porter id:Cole Porter it:Cole Porter he:קול פורטר la:Cole Albertus Porter lv:Kouls Porters nl:Cole Porter ja:コール・ポーター no:Cole Porter oc:Cole Porter pl:Cole Porter pt:Cole Porter ru:Коул Портер simple:Cole Porter fi:Cole Porter sv:Cole Porter tt:Коул Портер uk:Коул Портер vec:Cole PorterThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
{{infobox person| name | Fred Astaire |
---|---|
birth name | Frederick Austerlitz |
birth date | May 10, 1899 |
birth place | Omaha, Nebraska,United States |
death date | June 22, 1987 |
death place | Los Angeles, California,United States |
occupation | Actor, dancer, singer, choreographer |
years active | 1904–81 |
spouse | Phyllis Livingston Potter (1933–54; her death)Robyn Smith(1980–87; his death) |
relatives | Adele Astaire(sister, deceased) }} |
Gene Kelly, another major innovator in filmed dance, said that "the history of dance on film begins with Astaire". Beyond film and television, many classical dancers and choreographers, Rudolf Nureyev, Sammy Davis Jr., Michael Jackson, Gregory Hines, Mikhail Baryshnikov, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins among them, also acknowledged his importance and influence.
After arriving in New York City at age 24 on October 26, 1892, and being processed at Ellis Island, Astaire's father, hoping to find work in his brewing trade, moved to Omaha, Nebraska, and landed a job with the Storz Brewing Company. Astaire's mother dreamed of escaping Omaha by virtue of her children's talents, after Astaire's sister, Adele Astaire, early on revealed herself to be an instinctive dancer and singer. She planned a "brother-and-sister act," which was common in vaudeville at the time. Although Astaire refused dance lessons at first, he easily mimicked his older sister's step and took up piano, accordion and clarinet.
When their father suddenly lost his job, the family moved to New York City to launch the show business career of the children. Despite Adele and Fred's teasing rivalry, they quickly acknowledged their individual strengths, his durability and her greater talent. Sister and brother took the name "Astaire" in 1905, as they were taught dance, speaking, and singing in preparation for developing an act. Family legend attributes the name to an uncle surnamed "L'Astaire".
Their first act was called ''Juvenile Artists Presenting an Electric Musical Toe-Dancing Novelty''. Fred wore a top hat and tails in the first half and a lobster outfit in the second. The goofy act debuted in Keyport, New Jersey, in a "tryout theater." The local paper wrote, "the Astaires are the greatest child act in vaudeville."
As a result of their father's salesmanship, Fred and Adele rapidly landed a major contract and played the famed Orpheum Circuit not only in Omaha, but throughout the United States. Soon Adele grew to at least three inches taller than Fred and the pair began to look incongruous. The family decided to take a two-year break from show business to let time take its course and to avoid trouble from the Gerry Society and the child labor laws of the time. In 1912, Fred became an Episcopalian.
The career of the Astaire siblings resumed with mixed fortunes, though with increasing skill and polish, as they began to incorporate tap dancing into their routines. Astaire's dancing was inspired by Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and John "Bubbles" Sublett. From vaudeville dancer Aurelio Coccia, they learned the tango, waltz and other ballroom dances popularized by Vernon and Irene Castle.
Some sources state that the Astaire siblings appeared in a 1915 film entitled ''Fanchon, the Cricket'', starring Mary Pickford, but the Astaires have consistently denied this.
Fred Astaire first met George Gershwin, who was working as a song plugger in Jerome H. Remick's, in 1916. Fred had already been hunting for new music and dance ideas. Their chance meeting was to deeply affect the careers of both artists.
Astaire was always on the lookout for new steps on the circuit and was starting to demonstrate his ceaseless quest for novelty and perfection. The Astaires broke into Broadway in 1917 with ''Over the Top'', a patriotic revue.
By this time, Astaire's dancing skill was beginning to outshine his sister's, though she still set the tone of their act and her sparkle and humor drew much of the attention, due in part to Fred's careful preparation and strong supporting choreography.
During the 1920s, Fred and Adele appeared on Broadway and on the London stage in shows such as George and Ira Gershwin's ''Lady Be Good'' (1924) and ''Funny Face'' (1927), and later in ''The Band Wagon'' (1931), winning popular acclaim with the theater crowd on both sides of the Atlantic. By then, Astaire's tap dancing was recognized as among the best, as Robert Benchley wrote in 1930, "I don't think that I will plunge the nation into war by stating that Fred is the greatest tap-dancer in the world."
After the close of ''Funny Face'', the Astaires went to Hollywood for a screen test (now lost) at Paramount Pictures, but were not considered suitable for films.
They split in 1932 when Adele married her first husband, Lord Charles Arthur Francis Cavendish, a son of the Duke of Devonshire. Fred Astaire went on to achieve success on his own on Broadway and in London with ''Gay Divorce'', while considering offers from Hollywood. The end of the partnership was traumatic for Astaire, but stimulated him to expand his range. Free of the brother-sister constraints of the former pairing and with a new partner (Claire Luce), he created a romantic partnered dance to Cole Porter's "Night and Day", which had been written for ''Gay Divorce''. Luce stated that she had to encourage him to take a more romantic approach: "Come on, Fred, I'm not your sister, you know." The success of the stage play was credited to this number, and when recreated in the film version of the play ''The Gay Divorcee'' (1934), it ushered in a new era in filmed dance. Recently, film footage taken by Fred Stone of Astaire performing in ''Gay Divorce'' with Luce's successor, Dorothy Stone, in New York in 1933 was uncovered by dancer and historian Betsy Baytos and now represents the earliest known performance footage of Astaire.
On his return to RKO Pictures, he got fifth billing alongside Ginger Rogers in the 1933 Dolores del Río 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 likable 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 profession, which has long admitted that Astaire starts dancing where the others stop hoofing."
Having already been linked to his sister Adele on stage, Astaire was initially very reluctant to become part of another dance team. He wrote his agent, "I don't mind making another picture with her, but as for this ''team'' idea it's ''out!'' I've just managed to live down one partnership and I don't want to be bothered with any more." He was persuaded by the obvious public appeal of the Astaire-Rogers pairing. The partnership, and the choreography of Astaire and Hermes Pan, helped make dancing an important element of the Hollywood film musical. Astaire and Rogers made ten films together, including ''The Gay Divorcee'', ''Roberta'' (1935), ''Top Hat'' (1935), ''Follow the Fleet'' (1936), ''Swing Time'' (1936), ''Shall We Dance'' (1937), and ''Carefree'' (1938). Six out of the nine Astaire-Rogers musicals became the biggest moneymakers for RKO; all of the films brought a certain prestige and artistry that all studios coveted at the time. Their partnership elevated them both to stardom; as Katharine Hepburn reportedly said, "He gives her class and she gives him sex."
Astaire received a percentage of the films' profits, something extremely rare in actors' contracts at that time; and complete autonomy over how the dances would be presented, allowing him to revolutionize dance on film.
Astaire is credited with two important innovations in early film musicals. First, he insisted 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. Astaire famously quipped: "Either the camera will dance, or I will." Astaire maintained this policy from ''The Gay Divorcee'' (1934) onwards (until overruled by Francis Ford Coppola, who directed ''Finian's Rainbow'' (1968), Astaire's last film musical). Astaire's style of dance sequences thus contrasted with the Busby Berkeley musicals, which were known for dance sequences filled with extravagant aerial shots, quick takes, and zooms on certain areas of the body, such as the arms or legs. Second, Astaire was adamant that all song and dance routines be seamlessly integrated into the plotlines of the film. Instead of using dance as spectacle as Busby Berkeley did, Astaire used it to move the plot along. 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, Hannah Hyam and John Mueller consider Rogers to have been Astaire's greatest dance partner, while recognizing that some of his later partners displayed superior technical dance skills, a view shared by Hermes Pan and Stanley Donen. Film critic Pauline Kael adopts a more neutral stance, while ''Time'' magazine film critic Richard Schickel writes "The nostalgia surrounding Rogers-Astaire tends to bleach out other partners."
Mueller sums up Rogers's 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." According to Astaire, "Ginger had never danced with a partner before ["Flying Down to Rio"]. 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."
For her part, Rogers described Astaire's uncompromising standards extending to the whole production, "Sometimes he'll think of a new line of dialogue or a new angle for the story ... they never know what time of night he'll call up and start ranting enthusiastically about a fresh idea ... No loafing on the job on an Astaire picture, and no cutting corners."
Astaire was still unwilling to have his career tied exclusively to any partnership, however. He negotiated with RKO to strike out on his own with ''A Damsel in Distress'' in 1937 with an inexperienced, non-dancing Joan Fontaine, unsuccessfully as it turned out. He returned to make two more films with Rogers, ''Carefree'' (1938) and ''The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle'' (1939). While both films earned respectable gross incomes, they both lost money due to increased production costs and Astaire left RKO. Rogers remained and went on to become the studio's hottest property in the early forties. They were reunited in 1949 at MGM for their final outing, ''The Barkleys of Broadway''.
He played alongside Bing Crosby in ''Holiday Inn'' (1942) and later ''Blue Skies'' (1946), but in spite of the enormous financial success of both, was reportedly dissatisfied with roles where he lost the girl to Crosby. The former film is particularly remembered for his virtuoso solo dance to "Let's Say it with Firecrackers" while the latter film featured an innovative song and dance routine to a song indelibly associated with him: "Puttin' on the Ritz". Other partners during this period included Paulette Goddard in ''Second Chorus'' (1940), in which he dance-conducted the Artie Shaw orchestra.
He made two pictures with Rita Hayworth, the daughter of his former vaudeville dance idols, the Cansinos: the first ''You'll Never Get Rich'' (1941) catapulted Hayworth to stardom and provided Astaire with his first opportunity to integrate Latin-American dance idioms into his style, taking advantage of Hayworth's professional Latin dance pedigree. His second film with Hayworth, ''You Were Never Lovelier'' (1942) was equally successful, and featured a duet to Kern's "I'm Old Fashioned" which became the centerpiece of Jerome Robbins's 1983 New York City Ballet tribute to Astaire. He next appeared opposite the seventeen-year-old Joan Leslie in the wartime drama ''The Sky's the Limit'' (1943) where he introduced Arlen and Mercer's "One for My Baby" while dancing on a bar counter in a dark and troubled routine. This film which was choreographed by Astaire alone and achieved modest box office success, represented an important departure for Astaire from his usual charming happy-go-lucky screen persona and confused contemporary critics.
His next partner, Lucille Bremer, was featured in two lavish vehicles, both directed by Vincente Minnelli: the fantasy ''Yolanda and the Thief'' which featured an avant-garde surrealistic ballet, and the musical revue ''Ziegfeld Follies'' (1946) which featured a memorable teaming of Astaire with Gene Kelly to "The Babbit and the Bromide", a Gershwin song Astaire had introduced with his sister Adele back in 1927. While ''Follies'' was a hit, ''Yolanda'' bombed at the box office and Astaire, ever insecure and believing his career was beginning to falter surprised his audiences by announcing his retirement during the production of ''Blue Skies'' (1946), nominating "Puttin' on the Ritz" as his farewell dance.
After announcing his retirement in 1946, Astaire concentrated on his horse-racing interests and went on to found the Fred Astaire Dance Studios in 1947 — which he subsequently sold in 1966.
During 1952 Astaire recorded ''The Astaire Story'', a four-volume album with a quintet led by Oscar Peterson. The album provided a musical overview of Astaire's career, and was produced by Norman Granz. ''The Astaire Story'' later won the Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1999, a special Grammy award to honor recordings that are at least twenty-five years old, and that have "qualitative or historical significance."
His legacy at this point was 30 musical films in 25 years. 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).
Fred played the role of Julian Osborne in the 1959 movie ''On the Beach'' and was nominated a Golden Globe Best Supporting Actor award for his performance, losing to Stephen Boyd in ''Ben Hur'' . Astaire's last major musical film was ''Finian's Rainbow'' (1968), directed by Francis Ford Coppola. 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 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. Unfortunately, the film was a box-office failure, though it has gained a strong reputation over the years since its release.
Astaire continued to act into the 1970s, appearing on television as the father of Robert Wagner's character of Alexander Mundy in ''It Takes a Thief'' and in films such as ''The Towering Inferno'' (1974), in which he danced with Jennifer Jones and for which he received his only Academy Award nomination, in the category of Best Supporting Actor. He voiced the mailman narrator in 1970's classic animated film ''Santa Claus is Comin' to Town''. He appeared in the first two ''That's Entertainment!'' documentaries in the mid 1970s. In the second, aged seventy-six, he performed a number of song-and-dance routines with Kelly, his last dance performances in a musical film. In the summer of 1975, he made three albums in London, ''Attitude Dancing'', ''They Can't Take These Away From Me'', and ''A Couple of Song and Dance Men'', the last an album of duets with Bing Crosby. In 1976, he played a supporting role as a dog owner in the cult movie ''The Amazing Dobermans'', co-starring Barbara Eden and James Franciscus. Fred Astaire played Dr. Seamus Scully in the French film ''The Purple Taxi'' (1977). In 1978, he 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 television series ''Battlestar Galactica'' in 1979, as Chameleon, the possible father of Starbuck, in "The Man with Nine Lives", a role written for him by Donald P. Bellisario. Astaire asked his agent to obtain a role for him on ''Galactica'' because of his grandchildren's interest in the series. His final film role was the 1981 adaptation of Peter Straub's novel ''Ghost Story.'' This horror film was also the last for two of his most prominent castmates, Melvyn Douglas and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
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 black rhythms, classical dance and the elevated style of Vernon and Irene Castle, to create a uniquely recognizable dance style which greatly influenced the American Smooth style of ballroom dance, and set standards against which subsequent film dance musicals would be judged. He termed his eclectic approach his "outlaw style", an unpredictable and instinctive blending of personal artistry. His dances are economical yet endlessly nuanced, as Jerome Robbins stated, "Astaire's dancing looks so simple, so disarming, so easy, yet the understructure, the way he sets the steps on, over or against the music, is so surprising and inventive." Astaire further observes:
Working out the steps is a very complicated process — something like writing music. You have to think of some step that flows into the next one, and the whole dance must have an integrated pattern. If the dance is right, there shouldn't be a single superfluous movement. It should build to a climax and stop!"
With very few exceptions, Astaire created his routines in collaboration with other choreographers, primarily Hermes Pan. They would often start with a blank slate:
"For maybe a couple of days we wouldn't get anywhere — just stand in front of the mirror and fool around ... Then suddenly I'd get an idea or one of them would get an idea ... So then we'd get started ... You might get practically the whole idea of the routine done that day, but then you'd work on it, edit it, scramble it, and so forth. It might take sometimes as long as two, three weeks to get something going."
Frequently, a dance sequence was built around two or three principal ideas, sometimes inspired by his own steps or by the music itself, suggesting a particular mood or action. Many of his dances were built around a "gimmick", such as dancing on the walls in "Royal Wedding," or dancing with his shadows in ''Swing Time'', that he or his collaborator had thought up earlier and saved for the right situation. They would spend weeks creating all the dance sequences in a secluded rehearsal space before filming would begin, working with a rehearsal pianist (often the composer Hal Borne) who in turn would communicate modifications to the musical orchestrators.
His perfectionism was legendary; however, his relentless insistence on rehearsals and retakes was a burden to some. When time approached for the shooting of a number, Astaire would rehearse for another two weeks, and record the singing and music. With all the preparation completed, the actual shooting would go quickly, conserving costs. Astaire agonized during the entire process, frequently asking colleagues for acceptance for his work, as Vincente Minnelli stated, "He lacks confidence to the most enormous degree of all the people in the world. He will not even go to see his rushes ... He always thinks he is no good." As Astaire himself observed, "I've never yet got anything 100% right. Still it's never as bad as I think it is."
Although he viewed himself as an entertainer first and foremost, his consummate artistry won him the admiration of such twentieth century dance legends as Gene Kelly, George Balanchine, the Nicholas Brothers, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Margot Fonteyn, Bob Fosse, Gregory Hines, Rudolf Nureyev, Michael Jackson and Bill Robinson. Balanchine compared him to Bach, describing him as "the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times", while for Baryshnikov he was "a genius ... a classical dancer like I never saw in my life".
Astaire also co-introduced a number of song classics via song duets with his partners. For example, with his sister Adele, he co-introduced the Gershwins' "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise" from ''Stop Flirting'' (1923), "Fascinating Rhythm" in ''Lady, Be Good'' (1924), "Funny Face" in ''Funny Face'' (1927); and, in duets with Ginger Rogers, he presented Irving Berlin's "I'm Putting all My Eggs in One Basket" in ''Follow the Fleet'' (1936), Jerome Kern's "Pick Yourself Up" and "A Fine Romance" in ''Swing Time'' (1936), along with The Gershwins' "Let's Call The Whole Thing Off" from ''Shall We Dance'' (1937). With Judy Garland, he sang Irving Berlin's "A Couple of Swells" from ''Easter Parade'' (1948); and, with Jack Buchanan, Oscar Levant, and Nanette Fabray he delivered Betty Comden and Adolph Green's "That's Entertainment" from ''The Band Wagon'' (1953).
Although he possessed a light voice, he was admired for his lyricism, diction and phrasing — the grace and elegance so prized in his dancing seemed to be reflected in his singing, a capacity for synthesis which led Burton Lane to describe him as "The world's greatest musical performer." Irving Berlin considered Astaire the equal of any male interpreter of his songs — "as good as Jolson, Crosby or Sinatra, not necessarily because of his voice, but for his conception of projecting a song." Jerome Kern considered him the supreme male interpreter of his songs and Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer also admired his unique treatment of their work. And while George Gershwin was somewhat critical of Astaire's singing abilities, he wrote many of his most memorable songs for him. In his heyday, Astaire was referenced in lyrics of songwriters Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart and Eric Maschwitz and continues to inspire modern songwriters.
Astaire was a songwriter of note himself, with "I'm Building Up to an Awful Letdown" (written with lyricist Johnny Mercer) reaching number four in the Hit Parade of 1936. He recorded his own "It's Just Like Taking Candy from a Baby" with Benny Goodman in 1940, and nurtured a lifelong ambition to be a successful popular song composer.
Built in 1905, the Gottlieb Storz Mansion in Astaire's hometown of Omaha includes the "Adele and Fred Astaire Ballroom" on the top floor, which is the only memorial to their Omaha roots.
Astaire is referenced in the 2003 animated feature, ''The Triplets of Belleville'', in which he is eaten by his shoes after a fast-paced dance act.
Always immaculately turned out, with Cary Grant he was called "the best-dressed actor in American movies". Astaire remained a male fashion icon even into his later years, eschewing his trademark top hat, white tie and tails (which he never really cared for) in favor of a breezy casual style of tailored sports jackets, colored shirts, cravats and slacks — the latter usually held up by the idiosyncratic use of an old tie in place of a belt.
Astaire married for the first time in 1933, to the 25-year-old Phyllis Potter (née Phyllis Livingston Baker, 1908–1954), a Boston-born New York socialite and former wife of Eliphalet Nott Potter III (1906–1981), after pursuing her ardently for roughly two years. Phyllis's death from lung cancer, at the age of 46, ended 21 years of a blissful marriage and left Astaire devastated. Astaire attempted to drop out of the film ''Daddy Long Legs'' (1955), offering to pay the production costs to date, but was persuaded to stay.
In addition to Phyllis Potter's son, Eliphalet IV, known as Peter, the Astaires had two children. Fred, Jr. (born 1936) appeared with his father in the movie ''Midas Run'', but became a charter pilot and rancher instead of an actor. Ava Astaire McKenzie (born 1942) remains actively involved in promoting her late father's heritage.
His friend David Niven described him as "a pixie — timid, always warm-hearted, with a penchant for schoolboy jokes." Astaire was a lifelong golf and Thoroughbred horse racing enthusiast. In 1946 his horse Triplicate won the prestigious Hollywood Gold Cup and San Juan Capistrano Handicap. He remained physically active well into his eighties. At age seventy-eight, he broke his left wrist while riding his grandson's skateboard.
He remarried in 1980 to Robyn Smith, a jockey almost 45 years his junior. Smith was a jockey for Alfred G. Vanderbilt II.
Astaire died from pneumonia on June 22, 1987. He 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.
Astaire has never been portrayed on film. He always refused permission for such portrayals, saying, "However much they offer me — and offers come in all the time — I shall not sell." Astaire's will included a clause requesting that no such portrayal ever take place; he commented, "It is there because I have no particular desire to have my life misinterpreted, which it would be."
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name | Ginger Rogers |
---|---|
birth name | Virginia Katherine McMath |
birth date | July 16, 1911 |
birth place | Independence, Missouri, U.S. |
death date | April 25, 1995 |
death place | Rancho Mirage, California, U.S. |
occupation | Actress, singer, artist, and dancer |
years active | 1925–94 |
spouse | Jack Pepper (1929–31; divorced)Lew Ayres (1934–41; divorced)Jack Briggs (1943–49; divorced)Jacques Bergerac (1953–57; divorced)William Marshall (1961–69; divorced) }} |
Ginger Rogers (July 16, 1911 – April 25, 1995) was an American actress, dancer, and singer who appeared in film, and on stage, radio, and television throughout much of the 20th century.
During her long career, she made a total of 73 films, and is noted for her role as Fred Astaire's romantic interest and dancing partner in a series of ten Hollywood musical films that revolutionized the genre. She also achieved great success in a variety of film roles and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in ''Kitty Foyle'' (1940). She ranks #14 on the AFI's 100 Years…100 Stars list of actress screen legends.
Rogers was to remain close to her grandfather (much later, when she was a star in 1939, she bought him a home at 5115 Greenbush Avenue in Sherman Oaks, California so that he could be close to her while she was filming at the studios).
One of Rogers' young cousins, Helen, had a hard time pronouncing her first name, shortening it to "Ginga"; the nickname stuck.
When Rogers was nine years old, her mother married John Logan Rogers. Ginger took the name of Rogers, though she was never legally adopted. They lived in Fort Worth, Texas. Her mother became a theater critic for a local newspaper, the ''Fort Worth Record''. Ginger attended but did not graduate from Fort Worth's Central High School.
As a teenager, Rogers thought of becoming a schoolteacher, but with her mother's interest in Hollywood and the theater, her early exposure to the theater increased. Waiting for her mother in the wings of the Majestic Theatre, she began to sing and dance along with the performers on stage.
At 17, Rogers married Jack Culpepper, a singer/dancer/comedian/recording artist of the day who worked under the name Jack Pepper (according to Ginger's autobiography, she knew Culpepper when she was a child, as her cousin's boyfriend). They formed a short-lived vaudeville double act known as "Ginger and Pepper". The marriage was over within months, and she went back to touring with her mother. When the tour got to New York City, she stayed, getting radio singing jobs and then her Broadway theater debut in a musical called ''Top Speed'', which opened on Christmas Day, 1929.
Within two weeks of opening in ''Top Speed'', Rogers was chosen to star on Broadway in ''Girl Crazy'' by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, the musical play widely considered to have made stars of both her and Ethel Merman. Fred Astaire was hired to help the dancers with their choreography. Her appearance in ''Girl Crazy'' made her an overnight star at the age of 19. In 1930, she was signed by Paramount Pictures to a seven-year contract.
Rogers would soon get herself out of the Paramount contract—under which she had made five feature films at Astoria Studios in Astoria, Queens—and move with her mother to Hollywood. When she got to California, she signed a three-picture deal with Pathé. She made feature films for Warner Bros., Monogram, and Fox in 1932 and was named one of fifteen "WAMPAS Baby Stars". She then made a significant breakthrough as "Anytime Annie" in the Warner Brothers film ''42nd Street'' (1933). She went on to make a series of films with Fox, Warner Bros. ("Gold Diggers of 1933"), Universal, Paramount, and RKO Radio Pictures and, in her second RKO picture, ''Flying Down to Rio'' (1933), she worked for the first time with Fred Astaire. (Note, however, that the Wikipedia entry for 'Embraceable You' claims that they worked together previously on the stage production of Girl Crazy).
Rogers was most famous for her partnership with Fred Astaire. Together, from 1933 to 1939, they made nine musical films at RKO: ''Flying Down to Rio'' (1933), ''The Gay Divorcee'' (1934), ''Roberta'' (1935), ''Top Hat'' (1935), ''Follow the Fleet'' (1936), ''Swing Time'' (1936), ''Shall We Dance'' (1937), ''Carefree'' (1938), and ''The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle'' (1939) (''The Barkleys of Broadway'' (1949) was produced later at MGM). They revolutionized the Hollywood musical, introducing dance routines of unprecedented elegance and virtuosity, set to songs specially composed for them by the greatest popular song composers of the day.
Arlene Croce, Hannah Hyam and John Mueller all consider Rogers to have been Astaire's finest dance partner, principally because of her ability to combine dancing skills, natural beauty, and exceptional abilities as a dramatic actress and comedienne, thus truly complementing Astaire, a peerless dancer who sometimes struggled as an actor and was not considered classically handsome. The resulting song and dance partnership enjoyed a unique credibility in the eyes of audiences. Of the 33 partnered dances she performed with Astaire, Croce and Mueller have highlighted the infectious spontaneity of her performances in the comic numbers "I'll Be Hard to Handle" from ''Roberta'' (1935), "I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket" from ''Follow the Fleet'' (1936) and "Pick Yourself Up" from ''Swing Time'' (1936). They also point to the use Astaire made of her remarkably flexible back in classic romantic dances such as "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" from ''Roberta'' (1935), "Cheek to Cheek" from ''Top Hat'' (1935) and "Let's Face the Music and Dance" from ''Follow the Fleet'' (1936). For special praise, they have singled out her performance in "Waltz in Swing Time" from ''Swing Time'' (1936), which is generally considered to be the most virtuosic partnered routine ever committed to film by Astaire. She generally avoided solo dance performances: Astaire always included at least one virtuoso solo routine in each film, while Rogers performed only one: "Let Yourself Go" from ''Follow the Fleet'' (1936).
Although the dance routines were choreographed by Astaire and his collaborator Hermes Pan, both have acknowledged Rogers's input and have also testified to her consummate professionalism, even during periods of intense strain, as she tried to juggle her many other contractual film commitments with the punishing rehearsal schedules of Astaire, who made at most two films in any one year. In 1986, shortly before his death, Astaire remarked, "All the girls I ever danced with thought they couldn't do it, but of course they could. So they always cried. All except Ginger. No no, Ginger never cried". John Mueller summed up Rogers's 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". According to Astaire, when they were first teamed together in "Flying Down to Rio", "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." Astaire also had this to say to Raymond Rohauer, curator at the New York Gallery of Modern Art: "Ginger was brilliantly effective. She made everything work for her. Actually she made things very fine for both of us and she deserves most of the credit for our success."
Rogers also introduced some celebrated numbers from the Great American Songbook, songs such as Harry Warren and Al Dubin's "The Gold Diggers' Song (We're in the Money)" from ''Gold Diggers of 1933'' (1933), "Music Makes Me" from ''Flying Down to Rio'' (1933), "The Continental" from ''The Gay Divorcee'' (1934), Irving Berlin's "Let Yourself Go" from ''Follow the Fleet'' (1936), the Gershwins' "Embraceable You" from ''Girl Crazy'' and "They All Laughed (at Christopher Columbus)" from ''Shall We Dance'' (1937). Furthermore, in song duets with Astaire, she co-introduced Berlin's "I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket" from ''Follow the Fleet'' (1936), Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields's "Pick Yourself Up" and "A Fine Romance" from ''Swing Time'' (1936) and the Gershwins' "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" from ''Shall We Dance'' (1937).
Both before and immediately after her dancing and acting partnership with Fred Astaire ended, Rogers starred in a number of successful dramas and comedies. ''Stage Door'' (1937) demonstrated her dramatic capacity, as the loquacious yet vulnerable girl next door, a tough minded, theatrical hopeful, opposite Katharine Hepburn. In ''Roxie Hart'' (1942), based on the same play which served as the template for the musical ''Chicago'', Ginger played a wise-cracking wife on trial for a murder her husband committed. In the neo-realist ''Primrose Path'' (1940), directed by Gregory La Cava, she played a prostitute's daughter trying to avoid the fate of her mother. Further highlights of this period included ''Tom, Dick, and Harry'', a 1941 comedy where she dreams of marrying three different men; ''I'll Be Seeing You'', an intelligent and restrained war time "weepie" with Joseph Cotten; La Cava's ''5th Avenue Girl'' (1939), where she played an out-of-work girl sucked into the lives of a wealthy family; and especially the sharp and highly successful comedies: ''Bachelor Mother'' (1939), where she played Polly Parrish, a shop girl who is falsely deemed to have abandoned her baby; and Billy Wilder's first Hollywood feature film: ''The Major and the Minor'' (1942), in which she played a woman who masquerades as a 12-year-old to get a cheap train ticket and finds herself obliged to continue the ruse for an extended period. This film featured a performance by Rogers's own real mother, Lela, playing her film mother.
Her greatest skills were as a comedienne; as a master of the wisecrack, the deadpan, and the sidelong glance, she became well established as one of the major actresses of the screwball comedy era.
In 1941, Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in 1940's ''Kitty Foyle''. She enjoyed considerable success during the early 1940s, and was RKO's hottest property during this period. Becoming a free agent, she made hugely successful films with other studios in the mid-'40s, including "Tender Comrade" (1943), "Lady in the Dark" (1944), and "Week-End at the Waldorf" (1945), and became the highest-paid performer in Hollywood. However, by the end of the decade, her film career had peaked. Arthur Freed reunited her with Fred Astaire in ''The Barkleys of Broadway'' in 1949, a delightful Technicolor MGM musical which succeeded in rekindling the special chemistry between them one last time.
Ginger Rogers' film career entered a period of gradual decline in the 1950s, as parts for older actresses became more difficult to obtain, but she still scored with some solid films. She starred in ''Storm Warning'' (1950) with Ronald Reagan and Doris Day, the noir, anti Ku Klux Klan film by Warner Brothers, and in ''Monkey Business'' (1952) with Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe, directed by Howard Hawks. In the same year, she also starred in ''We're Not Married!'', also featuring Marilyn Monroe, and in ''Dreamboat''. She played the female lead in ''Tight Spot'' (1955), a mystery thriller, with Edward G. Robinson. Then, after a series of unremarkable films, she scored with a great popular success, playing Dolly Levi in the long-running ''Hello, Dolly!'' on Broadway in 1965.
In later life, Rogers remained on good terms with Astaire: she presented him with a special Academy Award in 1950, and they were co-presenters of individual Academy Awards in 1967, during which they elicited a standing ovation when they came on stage in an impromptu dance. In 1969, she had the lead role in another long-running popular production of ''Mame'', from the book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in the West End of London, arriving for the role on the Liner QE2 from New York. Her docking there occasioned the maximum of pomp and ceremony at Southampton. She became the highest paid performer in the history of the West End up to that time. The production ran for 14 months and featured a Royal Command Performance for Queen Elizabeth the Second. The Kennedy Center honored Ginger Rogers in December 1992. This event, which was shown on television, was somewhat marred when Astaire's widow, Robyn Smith, who permitted clips of Astaire dancing with Rogers to be shown for free at the function itself, was unable to come to terms with CBS Television for broadcast rights to the clips (all previous rights holders having donated broadcast rights gratis).
From the 1950s onwards, Rogers would make occasional appearances on television. In the later years of her career, she made guest appearances in three different series by Aaron Spelling; ''The Love Boat'' (1979), ''Glitter'' (1984), and ''Hotel'' (1987) which would be her final screen appearance as an actress.
In her classic 1930s musicals with Astaire, Ginger Rogers, co-billed with him, was paid less than Fred, the creative force behind the dances, who also received 10% of the profits. But she was also paid less than many of the supporting "farceurs" billed beneath her, in spite of her much more central role in the films' great financial success. This was personally grating to her, and had effects upon her relationships at RKO, especially with director Mark Sandrich, whose disrespect of Rogers prompted a sharp letter of reprimand from producer Pandro Berman, which Rogers deemed important enough to publish in her autobiography. Like many actresses of the time, Ginger Rogers fought hard for her contract and salary rights, and for better films and scripts. She also found it necessary to fight for respect and dignity as an actress, and against the type casting as just the studio's "dancing girl". She eventually succeeded in all these endeavors.
Rogers' first marriage was to her dancing partner Jack Pepper (real name Edward Jackson Culpepper) on March 29, 1929. They divorced in 1931, having separated soon after the wedding. In 1934 she married actor Lew Ayres (1908–1996). At a time when Rogers' career was skyrocketing and Ayres' career was faltering, they separated, and were amicably divorced seven years later. To add to Rogers' woes in 1934, she sued Sylvia of Hollywood for $100K for defamation. Sylvia, Hollywood's fitness guru and radio personality, had claimed that Rogers was on Sylvia’s radio show when, in fact, she was not.
In 1940, Rogers purchased a 1000-acre (4 km²) ranch in Jackson County, Oregon between the cities of Shady Cove and Eagle Point. The ranch, located along the Rogue River, supplied dairy products to nearby Camp White, a cantonment established for the duration of World War II. While not performing or working on other projects, she would live at the ranch with her mother.
In 1943, Rogers married her third husband, Jack Briggs, a Marine. Upon his return from World War II, Briggs showed no interest in continuing his incipient Hollywood career. They divorced in 1949. In 1953 she married Jacques Bergerac, a Frenchman 16 years her junior, whom she met on a trip to Paris. A lawyer in France, he came to Hollywood with her and became an actor. They divorced in 1957. Her fifth and final husband was director and producer William Marshall. They married in 1961, and divorced in 1971, after his bouts with alcohol, and the financial collapse of their joint film production company in Jamaica.
Rogers was good friends with Lucille Ball — a distant cousin on Rogers' mother's side. Another friend, Bette Davis, had in common with Rogers a close maternal relationship. As early Hollywood actresses, all three shared a common interest in directing and producing. In fact, Ginger Rogers starred in one of the earliest films co-directed and co-scripted by a woman: Wanda Tuchock's ''Finishing School'' in 1934. In 1985, Rogers fulfilled a long-standing wish to direct by directing the musical ''Babes in Arms'' off-Broadway in Tarrytown, New York, when she was 74 years old. She appeared with Lucille Ball in an episode of ''Here's Lucy'' on November 22, 1971, where, with Lucie Arnaz, Rogers gave a demonstration of the Charleston in her famous high heels.
Rogers maintained a close friendship with her cousin, actress/writer/socialite Phyllis Fraser (whom she aided in a brief acting career), but was not Rita Hayworth's natural cousin as has been reported. Hayworth's maternal uncle, Vinton Hayworth, was married to Rogers's maternal aunt, Jean Owens.
In 1977, Rogers's mother died. Rogers remained at the 4-Rs (Rogers's Rogue River Ranch) until 1990, when she sold the property and moved to nearby Medford, Oregon. Her last public appearance was on March 18, 1995 when she received the Women's International Center (WIC) Living Legacy Award.
For many years, Rogers regularly supported, and held in-person presentations, at the Craterian Theater, in Medford, Oregon, where she had performed in 1926 as a vaudevillian. The theater was comprehensively restored in 1997, and posthumously renamed in her honor, as the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater.
Rogers would spend winters in Rancho Mirage and summers in Medford. She died in Rancho Mirage on April 25, 1995 of congestive heart failure at the age of 83. She was cremated; her ashes are interred in the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California, with Lela's, and just a short distance from the grave of Fred Astaire.
She was a lifelong conservative and a member of the Republican Party.
She was also a Christian Scientist.
A musical about the life of Rogers, entitled ''Backwards in High Heels'', premiered in Florida in early 2007.
Rogers was the heroine of a novel, ''Ginger Rogers and the Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak'' (1942, by Lela E. Rogers), where "the heroine has the same name and appearance as the famous actress but has no connection ... it is as though the famous actress has stepped into an alternate reality in which she is an ordinary person." The story was probably written for a young teenage audience and is reminiscent of the adventures of Nancy Drew. It is part of a series known as "Whitman Authorized Editions", 16 books published between 1941-1947 that featured a film actress as heroine.
Title !! Date !! Director !! Co-Starring !! Notes | |||||
''Young Man of Manhattan'' | 1930 | Monta Bell| | Claudette Colbert, Norman Foster (director)>Norman Foster | The line, "Cigarette me, big boy" became a popular catchphrase during the 1930s after audiences heard Ginger Rogers repeat it throughout the movie. | |
''Queen High'' | 1930| | Fred Newmeyer | |||
''The Sap from Syracuse'' | 1930| | A. Edward Sutherland | Jack Oakie | ||
''Follow the Leader (1930 film) | Follow the Leader'' | 1930| | Norman Taurog | ||
''Honor Among Lovers'' | 1931| | Dorothy Arzner | Claudette Colbert | ||
''The Tip Off'' | 1931| | Albert Rogell | |||
''Suicide Fleet'' | 1931| | Albert Rogell | |||
''Carnival Boat'' | 1932| | Albert Rogell | |||
''The Tenderfoot'' | 1932| | Ray Enright | Joe E. Brown | ||
''The Thirteenth Guest'' | 1932| | Albert Ray | |||
''Hat Check Girl'' | 1932| | Sidney Lanfield | Sidney Lanfield was the most frequent director on the Addams Family 1960s television show. | ||
''You Said a Mouthful'' | 1932| | Lloyd Bacon | Joe E. Brown | ||
''42nd Street (film) | 42nd Street'' | 1933| | Lloyd Bacon | Warner Baxter, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell | |
''Broadway Bad'' | 1933| | Sidney Lanfield | |||
''Gold Diggers of 1933'' | 1933| | Mervyn LeRoy | Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell | ||
''Professional Sweetheart'' | 1933| | William A. Seiter | Norman Foster | ||
''A Shriek in the Night'' | 1933| | Albert Ray | |||
''Don't Bet on Love'' | 1933| | Murray Roth | Lew Ayres | Ginger Rogers and Lew Ayres were married for seven years following this film. | |
''Sitting Pretty (1933 film) | Sitting Pretty'' | 1933| | Harry Joe Brown | Jack Oakie, Jack Haley | |
''Flying Down to Rio'' | 1933| | Thornton Freeland | Dolores Del Rio, Gene Raymond, Fred Astaire | The first of the Astaire-Rogers pairing. This is the only movie where Rogers is billed above Astaire. | |
''Chance at Heaven'' | 1933| | William A. Seiter | Joel McCrea | ||
''Rafter Romance'' | 1934| | William A. Seiter | Norman Foster | ||
''Finishing School (film) | Finishing School'' | 1934| | Wanda Tuchock and George Nicholas | Beulah Bondi | |
''Twenty Million Sweethearts'' | 1934| | Ray Enright | Dick Powell | ||
''Change of Heart (1934 film) | Change of Heart'' | 1934| | John G. Blystone | Shirley Temple | |
''Upperworld'' | 1934| | Roy Del Ruth | Mary Astor | ||
''The Gay Divorcee'' | 1934| | Mark Sandrich | Fred Astaire | ||
''Romance in Manhattan'' | 1934| | Stephen Roberts | |||
''Roberta'' | 1935| | William A. Seiter | Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire, Randolph Scott | Lucille Ball has an uncredited appearance as a model. She had lines deleted since her character was supposed to be a French model and she could not perfect the accent. | |
''Star of Midnight'' | 1935| | Stephen Roberts | William Powell | ||
''Top Hat'' | 1935| | Mark Sandrich | Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball | ||
''In Person'' | 1935| | William A. Seiter | George Brent | ||
''Follow the Fleet'' | 1936| | Mark Sandrich | Fred Astaire, Randolph Scott, Lucille Ball | ||
''Swing Time'' | 1936| | George Stevens | Fred Astaire | ||
''Shall We Dance (1937 film) | Shall We Dance'' | 1937| | Mark Sandrich | Fred Astaire | |
''Stage Door'' | 1937| | Gregory La Cava | Katherine Hepburn, Adolphe Menjou, Gail Patrick, Lucille Ball | ||
''Having Wonderful Time'' | 1938| | Alfred Santell | Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Lucille Ball, Red Skelton | This used much of the same cast as ''Stage Door''. | |
''Vivacious Lady'' | 1938| | George Stevens | James Stewart, Charles Coburn, Hattie McDaniel | ||
''Carefree (film) | Carefree'' | 1938| | Mark Sandrich | Fred Astaire, Jack Carson, Hattie McDaniel | |
''The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle'' | 1939| | H. C. Potter | Fred Astaire | ||
''Bachelor Mother'' | 1939| | Garson Kanin | David Niven, Charles Coburn | ||
''Fifth Avenue Girl'' | 1939| | Gregory La Cava | |||
''Primrose Path (film) | Primrose Path'' | 1940| | Gregory La Cava | Joel McCrea | |
''Lucky Partners'' | 1940| | Lewis Milestone | Ronald Colman, Jack Carson | ||
''Kitty Foyle (film) | Kitty Foyle'' | 1940| | Sam Wood | Dennis Morgan, James Craig (actor)>James Craig | Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress the first year that the Academy was not announcing the winners before the ceremony. She beat Bette Davis, Joan Fontaine, Martha Scott, and her former co-star Katherine Hepburn for the award. |
''Tom, Dick, and Harry'' | 1942| | Garson Kanin | Burgess Meredith | ||
''Roxie Hart'' | 1942| | William A. Wellman | Adolphe Menjou | ||
''Tales of Manhattan'' | 1942| | Julien Duvivier | Henry Fonda, Cesar Romero, Rita Hayworth, Gail Patrick | ||
''The Major and the Minor'' | 1942| | Billy Wilder | Ray Milland | Rogers campaigned hard for Billy Wilder and as a result this became his debut film. This remains one of Rogers' favorite movies. Near the end of the movie her real life mother, Lela Rogers, played her character's mother. | |
''Once Upon a Honeymoon'' | 1942| | Leo McCarey | Cary Grant | ||
''Tender Comrade'' | 1943| | Edward Dmytryk | |||
''Lady in the Dark (film) | Lady in the Dark'' | 1944| | Mitchell Leisen | Ray Milland, Warner Baxter | |
''I'll Be Seeing You (1944 film) | I'll Be Seeing You'' | 1944| | William Dieterle | Joseph Cotten, Shirley Temple | |
''Week-End at the Waldorf'' | 1945| | Robert Z. Leonard | Lana Turner | Grand Hotel (film)>Grand Hotel'' portraying the ballerina whom was first played on screen by Greta Garbo. | |
''Heartbeat (1946 film) | Heartbeat'' | 1946| | Sam Wood | Adolphe Menjou | |
''Magnificent Doll'' | 1946| | Frank Borzage | David Niven, Burgess Meredith | ||
''It Had to Be You (1947 film) | It Had to Be You'' | 1947| | Don Hartman and Rudolph Mate | Cornel Wilde | |
''The Barkleys of Broadway'' | 1949| | Charles Walters | Fred Astaire | Originally Rogers' role was meant for Judy Garland who had recently starred in the successful musical ''Easter Parade'' with Astaire. However she had to drop out of the project due to health issues and Rogers was sought as a last minute replacement. This is the only Astaire-Rogers film not released by RKO and the only one filmed in color (although the "I Used to Be Color Blind" number in ''Carefree'' was originally filmed in Technicolor). | |
''Perfect Strangers'' | 1950| | Bretaigne Windust | Dennis Morgan | ||
''Storm Warning (1951 film) | Storm Warning'' | 1950| | Stuart Heisler | Ronald Reagen, Doris Day | |
''The Groom Wore Spurs'' | 1951| | Richard Whorf | Jack Carson | ||
''We're Not Married'' | 1952| | Edmund Goulding | Marilyn Monroe, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Victor Moore | ||
''Monkey Business (1952 film) | Monkey Business'' | 1952| | Howard Hawks | Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Coburn | |
''Dreamboat'' | 1952| | Claude Binyon | |||
''Forever Female'' | 1953| | Irving Rapper | William Holden | ||
''Black Widow (1954 film) | Black Widow'' | 1954| | Nunnally Johnson | Gene Tierney | |
''Twist of Fate'' | 1954| | David Miller | This was released in Great Britain as "Beautiful Stranger." Rogers' husband at the time, Jacques Bergerac, appeared in the film. | ||
''Tight Spot'' | 1955| | Phil Karlson | Edward G. Robinson | ||
''The First Traveling Saleslady'' | 1956| | Arthur Lubin | Clint Eastwood | ||
''Teenage Rebel'' | 1956| | Edmund Goulding | |||
''Oh | Men, Oh! Women'' | 1957 | Nunnally Johnson| | David Niven | |
''The Confession'' | 1965| | William Dieterle | Ray Milland | Also known as "Quick, Let's Get Married." | |
''Harlow (Magna film) | ''Harlow'' (Magna film)'' | 1965| | Alex Segal | Carol Lynley | Roger's last film. |
Category:1911 births Category:1995 deaths Category:20th-century actors Category:American ballroom dancers Category:American Christian Scientists Category:American film actors Category:American tap dancers Category:Best Actress Academy Award winners Category:Burials at Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery Category:California Republicans Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in California Category:Deaths from congestive heart failure Category:Kennedy Center honorees Category:Missouri Republicans Category:People from Eagle Point, Oregon Category:People from Independence, Missouri Category:People from Rancho Mirage, California Category:Traditional pop music singers Category:Vaudeville performers
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Name | Judy Garland''' |
---|---|
Birth name | Frances Ethel Gumm |
Birth date | June 10, 1922 |
Birth place | Grand Rapids, Minnesota, U.S. |
Death date | June 22, 1969 |
Death place | Chelsea, London, England, UK |
Cause death | Drug Overdose |
Occupation | Actress, singer |
Years active | |
Spouse | |
Children | }} |
At 39 years of age, she was the youngest recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in the motion picture industry.
After appearing in vaudeville with her two older sisters, Garland was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a teenager. There she made more than two dozen films, including nine with Mickey Rooney and the 1939 film with which she would be most identified, ''The Wizard of Oz''. After 15 years, she was released from the studio but gained renewed success through record-breaking concert appearances, including a return to acting beginning with critically acclaimed performances.
Despite her professional triumphs, Garland battled personal problems throughout her life. Insecure about her appearance, her feelings were compounded by film executives who told her she was unattractive and manipulated her on-screen physical appearance. She was plagued by financial instability, often owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes. She married five times, with her first four marriages ending in divorce. She died of an accidental drug overdose at the age of 47, leaving children Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft, and Joey Luft.
In 1997, Garland was posthumously awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Several of her recordings have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. In 1999, the American Film Institute placed her among the ten greatest female stars in the history of American cinema.
Garland's ancestry on both sides of her family can be traced back to the early colonial days of the United States. Her father was descended from the Marable family of Virginia, her grandfather a Milne from Aberdeen (as she told an audience on May 29, 1951 in Edinburgh), and her mother from Patrick Fitzpatrick, who emigrated to America in the 1770s from Smithtown, County Meath, Ireland.
Named after both her parents and baptized at a local Episcopal church, "Baby" (as she was called by her parents and sisters) shared her family's flair for song and dance. Her first appearance came at the age of two-and-a-half when she joined her two older sisters, Mary Jane "Suzy/Suzanne" Gumm (1915–64) and Dorothy Virginia "Jimmie" Gumm (1917–77), on the stage of her father's movie theater during a Christmas show and sang a chorus of "Jingle Bells". Accompanied by their mother on piano, The Gumm Sisters performed at there for the next few years. Following rumors that Frank Gumm had made sexual advances toward male ushers there, the family relocated to Lancaster, California, in June 1926. Frank purchased and operated another theater in Lancaster, and Ethel, acting as their manager, began working to get her daughters into motion pictures. Garland graduated from Antelope Valley High School shortly after.
In 1934, the trio, who by then had been touring the vaudeville circuit as "The Gumm Sisters" for many years, performed in Chicago at the Oriental Theater with George Jessel. He encouraged the group to choose a more appealing name after "Gumm" was met with laughter from the audience. "The Garland Sisters" was chosen, and Frances changed her name to "Judy" soon after, inspired by a popular Hoagy Carmichael song.
Several stories persist regarding the origin of the name "Garland". One is that it was originated by Jessel after Carole Lombard's character Lily Garland in the film ''Twentieth Century'' which was then playing at the Oriental; another is that the girls chose the surname after drama critic Robert Garland. Garland's daughter Lorna Luft stated that her mother selected the name when Jessel announced that the trio "looked prettier than a garland of flowers". Another variation surfaced when he was a guest on Garland's television show in 1963. He claimed that he had sent actress Judith Anderson a telegram containing the word "garland," and it stuck in his mind.
At any rate, by late 1934 the "Gumm Sisters" had changed their name to the "Garland Sisters." They were broken up in August 1935, however, Suzanne Garland flew to Reno, Nevada, and married musician Lee Kahn, a member of the Jimmy Davis orchestra playing at Cal-Neva Lodge, Lake Tahoe.
On November 16, 1935, in the midst of preparing for a radio performance on the ''Shell Chateau Hour,'' Garland learned that her father, who had been hospitalized with meningitis, had taken a turn for the worse. Frank Gumm died the following morning, on November 17, leaving her devastated. Her song for the ''Shell Chateau Hour'' was her first professional rendition of "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart", a song which would become a standard in many of her concerts.
Garland next came to the attention of studio executives by singing a special arrangement of "You Made Me Love You" to Clark Gable at a birthday party held by the studio for the actor; her rendition was so well regarded that she performed the song in the all-star extravaganza ''Broadway Melody of 1938'' (1937), in which she sang it to a photograph of him.
MGM hit on a winning formula when it paired Garland with Mickey Rooney in a string of "backyard musicals". The duo first appeared together in the 1937 B movie ''Thoroughbreds Don't Cry''. They became a sensation, and teamed up again in ''Love Finds Andy Hardy''. She would eventually star with him in nine films.
To keep up with the frantic pace of making one film after another, Garland, Rooney, and other young performers were constantly given amphetamines, as well as barbiturates to take before going to bed. For Garland, this regular dose of drugs led to addiction and a lifelong struggle, and contributed to her eventual demise. She later resented the hectic schedule and felt that her youth had been stolen from her by MGM. Despite successful film and recording careers, several awards, critical praise, and her ability to fill concert halls worldwide, she was plagued throughout her life with self-doubt and required constant reassurance that she was talented and attractive.
Shooting commenced on October 13, 1938, and was completed on March 16, 1939, with a final cost of more than US$2 million. From the conclusion of filming, MGM kept Garland busy with promotional tours and the shooting of ''Babes in Arms''. She and Mickey Rooney were sent on a cross-country promotional tour, culminating in the August 17 New York City premiere at the Capitol Theater, which included a five-show-a-day appearance schedule for the two stars.
On November 17, 1939, Garland's mother, Ethel, married William P. Gillmore in Yuma, Arizona. It was the fourth anniversary of her first husband's death.
''The Wizard of Oz'' was a tremendous critical success, though its high budget and promotions costs of an estimated $4 million coupled with the lower revenue generated by children's tickets meant that the film did not make a profit until it was rereleased in the 1940s. At the 1940 Academy Awards ceremony, Garland received an Academy Juvenile Award for her performances in 1939, including ''The Wizard of Oz'' and ''Babes in Arms''. Following this recognition, she became one of MGM's most bankable stars.
At the age of 21, she was given the "glamour treatment" in ''Presenting Lily Mars'', in which she was dressed in "grown-up" gowns. Her lightened hair was also pulled up in a stylish fashion. However, no matter how glamorous or beautiful she appeared on screen or in photographs, she was never confident in her appearance and never escaped the "girl next door" image that had been created for her.
One of Garland's most successful films for MGM was ''Meet Me in St. Louis'' (1944), in which she introduced three standards: "The Trolley Song", "The Boy Next Door", and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". Vincente Minnelli was assigned to direct this movie, and he requested that makeup artist Dorothy Ponedel be assigned to her for the picture. Ponedel refined her appearance in several ways, including extending and reshaping her eyebrows, changing her hairline, modifying her lip line, and removing her nose discs. She appreciated the results so much that Ponedel was written into her contract for all her remaining pictures at MGM.
''The Clock'' (1945) was her first straight dramatic film, opposite Robert Walker. Though the film was critically praised and earned a profit, most movie fans expected her to sing. It would be many years before she acted again in a non-singing dramatic role.
Garland's other famous films of the 1940s include ''The Harvey Girls'' (1946), in which she introduced the Academy Award-winning song "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe", and ''The Pirate'' (1948).'''
Because of her mental condition, Garland was unable to complete a series of films. During the filming of ''The Barkleys of Broadway'', she was taking prescription sleeping medication along with illicitly obtained pills containing morphine. These, in combination with migraine headaches, led her to miss several shooting days in a row. After being advised by her doctor that she would only be able to work in four-to-five-day increments with extended rest periods between, MGM executive Arthur Freed made the decision to suspend her on July 18, 1948. She was replaced by Ginger Rogers.
Garland was cast in the film adaptation of ''Annie Get Your Gun'' in the title role of Annie Oakley. She was nervous at the prospect of taking on a role strongly identified with Ethel Merman, anxious about appearing in an unglamorous part after breaking from juvenile parts for several years, and disturbed by her treatment at the hands of director Busby Berkeley. She began arriving late to the set, and sometimes failed to appear. She was suspended from the picture on May 10, 1949, and was replaced by Betty Hutton.
Garland was next cast in the film ''Royal Wedding'' with Fred Astaire after June Allyson became pregnant in 1950. She again failed to report to the set on multiple occasions, and the studio suspended her contract on June 17, 1950. She was replaced by Jane Powell. Reputable biographies following her death stated that after this latest dismissal, she slightly grazed her neck with a broken water glass, requiring only a Band-Aid, but at the time, the public was informed that a despondent Garland had slashed her throat. "All I could see ahead was more confusion," Garland later said of this suicide attempt. "I wanted to black out the future as well as the past. I wanted to hurt myself and everyone who had hurt me."
Garland's personal and professional achievements during this time were marred by the actions of her mother, Ethel. In May 1952, at the height of her comeback, Ethel was featured in a ''Los Angeles Mirror'' story in which she revealed that while Garland was making a small fortune at the Palace, Ethel was working a desk job at Douglas Aircraft Company for $61 a week. They had been estranged for years, with Garland characterizing her mother as "no good for anything except to create chaos and fear" and accusing her of mismanaging and misappropriating her salary from the earliest days of her career. Garland's sister Virginia denied this, stating "Mama never took a dime from Judy." On January 5, 1953, Ethel was found dead in the Douglas Aircraft parking lot.
Upon its September 29 world premiere, the film was met with tremendous critical and popular acclaim. Before release it was edited at the instruction of Jack Warner; theater operators, concerned that they were losing money because they were only able to run the film for three or four shows per day instead of five or six, pressured the studio to make additional reductions. About 30 minutes of footage was cut, sparking outrage among critics and filmgoers. ''A Star is Born'' ended up losing money, and the secure financial position Garland had expected from the profits did not materialize. Transcona made no more films with Warner.
Garland was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress and, in the run-up to the 27th Academy Awards, was generally expected to be the winner. She could not attend the ceremony because she had just given birth to her son, Joseph Luft, so a television crew was in her hospital room with cameras and wires to televise her anticipated acceptance speech. The Oscar was won, however, by Grace Kelly for ''The Country Girl'' (1954). The camera crew was packing up before Kelly could even reach the stage. Garland even made jokes about the incident on her television series, saying "...and nobody said good-bye." Groucho Marx sent her a telegram after the awards ceremony, declaring her loss "the biggest robbery since Brinks". To this day, it is still considered to be one of the biggest upsets in the history of the Academy Awards and generally felt that she should have rightly won the Oscar and her performance far exceeded Kelly's. ''TIME'' magazine labeled her performance as "just about the greatest one-woman show in modern movie history". Garland won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Musical for the role.
Garland's films after ''A Star Is Born'' included ''Judgment at Nuremberg'' (1961) (for which she was Oscar-and Golden Globe-nominated for Best Supporting Actress), the animated feature ''Gay Purr-ee'' (1962), and ''A Child Is Waiting'' (1963) with Burt Lancaster. Her final film, ''I Could Go On Singing'' (1963), costarring Dirk Bogarde, mirrored her own life with its story of a world famous singing star. Her last screen performance of a song was the prophetic ''I Could Go on Singing'' at the end of the film.
In November 1959 Garland was hospitalized, diagnosed with acute hepatitis. Over the next few weeks several quarts of fluid were drained from her body until, still weak, she was released from the hospital in January 1960. She was told by doctors that she likely had five years or less to live, and that even if she did survive she would be a semi-invalid and would never sing again. She initially felt "greatly relieved" at the diagnosis. "The pressure was off me for the first time in my life." However, she successfully recovered over the next several months and, in August of that year, returned to the stage of the Palladium. She felt so warmly embraced by the British that she announced her intention to move permanently to England.
Her concert appearance at Carnegie Hall on April 23, 1961, was a considerable highlight, called by many "the greatest night in show business history". The two-record ''Judy at Carnegie Hall'' was certified gold, charting for 95 weeks on ''Billboard'', including 13 weeks at number one. The album won four Grammy Awards including Album of the Year and Best Female Vocal of the Year. The album has never been out of print.
In 1961, Garland and CBS settled their contract disputes with the help of her new agent, Freddie Fields, and negotiated a new round of specials. The first, entitled ''The Judy Garland Show'', aired in 1962 and featured guests Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Following this success, CBS made a $24 million offer to her for a weekly television series of her own, also to be called ''The Judy Garland Show'', which was deemed at the time in the press to be "the biggest talent deal in TV history". Although she had said as early as 1955 that she would never do a weekly television series, in the early 1960s she was in a financially precarious situation. Garland was several hundred thousand dollars in debt to the Internal Revenue Service, having failed to pay taxes in 1951 and 1952, and the financial failure of ''A Star is Born'' meant that she received nothing from that investment. A successful run on television was intended to secure her financial future.
Following a third special, ''Judy Garland and Her Guests Phil Silvers and Robert Goulet'', Garland's weekly series debuted September 29, 1963. ''The Judy Garland Show'' was critically praised, but for a variety of reasons (including being placed in the time slot opposite ''Bonanza'' on NBC) the show lasted only one season and was cancelled in 1964 after 26 episodes. Despite its short run, the series was nominated for four Emmy Awards. The demise of the series was personally and financially devastating for Garland, who never fully recovered from its failure.
A 1964 tour of Australia was largely disastrous. Garland's first concert in Sydney, held in the Sydney Stadium because no concert hall could accommodate the crowds who wanted to see her, went well and received positive reviews. Her second performance, in Melbourne, started an hour late. The crowd of 7,000, angered by her tardiness and believing her to be drunk, booed and heckled her, and she fled the stage after just 45 minutes. She later characterized the Melbourne crowd as "brutish". A second concert in Sydney was uneventful but the Melbourne appearance garnered her significant bad press. Some of that bad press was deflected by the announcement of a near fatal episode of pleurisy.
In February 1967, Garland had been cast as Helen Lawson in ''Valley of the Dolls'' for 20th Century Fox. The character of Neely O'Hara in the book by Jacqueline Susann was rumored to have been based on her. The role of O'Hara in the film was played by Patty Duke. During the filming, she missed rehearsals and was fired in April. She was replaced by Susan Hayward. Her prerecording of the song "I'll Plant My Own Tree" survived, along with her wardrobe tests.
Returning to the stage, Garland made her last appearances at New York's Palace Theatre in July, a 16-show tour, performing with her children Lorna and Joey Luft. She wore a sequined pantsuit on stage for this tour, which was part of the original wardrobe for her character in ''Valley of the Dolls.''
Garland and Luft were married on June 8, 1952, in Hollister, California, and she gave birth to their first child, Lorna, on November 21 and her third one, Joey, on March 29 1955
Garland sued Luft for divorce in 1963, claiming "cruelty" as the grounds. She also asserted that he had repeatedly struck her while he was drinking and that he had attempted to take their children from her by force. She had filed for divorce more than once previously, including as early as 1956.
Garland was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. Several of her recordings have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. These include "Over the Rainbow", which was ranked as the number one movie song of all time in the American Film Institute's "100 Years...100 Songs" list. Four more Garland songs are featured on the list: "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (#76), "Get Happy" (#61), "The Trolley Song" (#26), and "The Man That Got Away" (#11). She has twice been honored on U.S. postage stamps, in 1989 (as Dorothy) and again in 2006 (as Vicki Lester from ''A Star Is Born''). She is mentioned in the 1998 horror film ''I Still Know What You Did Last Summer'' when the hotel clerk is explaining the history of the hotel in the Bahamas where the film takes place.
Some have also suggested a connection between the date of Garland's death and funeral on June 27, 1969 and the Stonewall riots, the flashpoint of the modern Gay Liberation movement, which started in the early hours of June 28.
Garland has also been impersonated in several TV shows as well.
Category:1922 births Category:1969 deaths Category:People from Grand Rapids, Minnesota Category:Academy Juvenile Award winners Category:Accidental deaths in England Category:Actors from Minnesota Category:University High School (Los Angeles, California) alumni Category:American people of English descent Category:American child actors Category:American child singers Category:American contraltos Category:American female singers Category:American film actors Category:American voice actors Category:American musicians of English descent Category:American people of Irish descent Category:American people of Scottish descent Category:American radio personalities Category:Best Musical or Comedy Actress Golden Globe (film) winners Category:Burials at Ferncliff Cemetery Category:Capitol Records artists Category:Decca Records artists Category:Drug-related deaths in England Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Tony Award winners Category:Traditional pop music singers Category:Vaudeville performers Category:American expatriates in the United Kingdom Category:Real people associated with Oz
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name | Ella Fitzgerald |
---|---|
background | solo_singer |
birth name | Ella Jane Fitzgerald |
alias | First Lady of Song, Lady Ella |
born | April 25, 1917Newport News, Virginia, U.S. |
Origin | Yonkers, New York |
died | June 15, 1996Beverly Hills, California, U.S. |
genre | Swing, traditional pop, vocal jazz |
instrument | PianoVocals |
occupation | Vocalist |
years active | 1934–1993 |
label | Capitol, Decca, Pablo, Reprise, Verve |
website | EllaFitzgerald.com }} |
She is considered to be a notable interpreter of the Great American Songbook. Over the course of her 59 year recording career, she was the winner of 13 Grammy Awards and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George H. W. Bush.
In her youth Fitzgerald wanted to be a dancer, although she loved listening to jazz recordings by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and The Boswell Sisters. She idolized the lead singer Connee Boswell, later saying, "My mother brought home one of her records, and I fell in love with it....I tried so hard to sound just like her."
In 1932, her mother died from a heart attack. Following this trauma, Fitzgerald's grades dropped dramatically and she frequently skipped school. Abused by her stepfather, she was first taken in by an aunt and at one point worked as a lookout at a bordello and also with a Mafia-affiliated numbers runner. When the authorities caught up with her, she was first placed in the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale, the Bronx. However, when the orphanage proved too crowded she was moved to the New York Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York, a state reformatory. Eventually she escaped and for a time was homeless.
She made her singing debut at 17 on November 21, 1934 at the Apollo Theater. in Harlem, New York. She pulled in a weekly audience at the Apollo and won the opportunity to compete in one of the earliest of its famous "Amateur Nights". She had originally intended to go on stage and dance but, intimidated by the Edwards Sisters, a local dance duo, she opted to sing instead in the style of Connee Boswell. She sang Boswell's "Judy" and "The Object of My Affection," a song recorded by the Boswell Sisters, and won the first prize of US$25.00.
Her second marriage, in December 1947, was to the famous bass player Ray Brown, whom she had met while on tour with Dizzy Gillespie's band a year earlier. Together they adopted a child born to Fitzgerald's half-sister, Frances, whom they christened Ray Brown, Jr. With Fitzgerald and Brown often busy touring and recording, the child was largely raised by her aunt, Virginia. Fitzgerald and Brown divorced in 1953, bowing to the various career pressures both were experiencing at the time, though they would continue to perform together.
In July 1957, Reuters reported that Fitzgerald had secretly married Thor Einar Larsen, a young Norwegian, in Oslo. She had even gone as far as furnishing an apartment in Oslo, but the affair was quickly forgotten when Larsen was sentenced to five months hard labor in Sweden for stealing money from a young woman to whom he had previously been engaged.
Fitzgerald was also notoriously shy. Trumpet player Mario Bauza, who played behind Fitzgerald in her early years with Chick Webb, remembered that "she didn’t hang out much. When she got into the band, she was dedicated to her music….She was a lonely girl around New York, just kept herself to herself, for the gig." When, later in her career, the Society of Singers named an award after her, Fitzgerald explained, "I don't want to say the wrong thing, which I always do. I think I do better when I sing."
Already visually impaired by the effects of diabetes, Fitzgerald had both her legs amputated in 1993. In 1996 she died of the disease in Beverly Hills, California at the age of 79. She is buried in the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California. The career history and archival material from Ella's long career are housed in the Archives Center at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History while her personal music arrangements are at The Library of Congress. Her extensive cookbook collection was donated to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University while her published sheet music collection is at the Schoenberg Library at UCLA.
She began singing regularly with Webb's Orchestra through 1935 at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. Fitzgerald recorded several hit songs with them, including "Love and Kisses" and "(If You Can't Sing It) You'll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)". But it was her 1938 version of the nursery rhyme, "A-Tisket, A-Tasket", a song she co-wrote, that brought her wide public acclaim.
Chick Webb died on June 16, 1939, and his band was renamed "Ella Fitzgerald and her Famous Orchestra" with Ella taking on the role of bandleader. Fitzgerald recorded nearly 150 sides during her time with the orchestra, most of which, like "A-Tisket, A-Tasket," were "novelties and disposable pop fluff."
With Decca's Milt Gabler as her manager, she began working regularly for the jazz impresario Norman Granz, and appeared regularly in his Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) concerts. Fitzgerald's relationship with Granz was further cemented when he became her manager, although it would be nearly a decade before he could record her on one of his many record labels.
With the demise of the Swing era and the decline of the great touring big bands, a major change in jazz music occurred. The advent of bebop led to new developments in Fitzgerald's vocal style, influenced by her work with Dizzy Gillespie's big band. It was in this period that Fitzgerald started including scat singing as a major part of her performance repertoire. While singing with Gillespie, Fitzgerald recalled, "I just tried to do [with my voice] what I heard the horns in the band doing."
Her 1945 scat recording of Flying Home (arranged by Vic Schoen) would later be described by ''The New York Times'' as "one of the most influential vocal jazz records of the decade....Where other singers, most notably Louis Armstrong, had tried similar improvisation, no one before Miss Fitzgerald employed the technique with such dazzling inventiveness." Her bebop recording of "Oh, Lady be Good!" (1947) was similarly popular and increased her reputation as one of the leading jazz vocalists.
Perhaps responding to criticism and under pressure from Granz, who felt that Fitzgerald was given unsuitable material to record during this period, her last years on the Decca label saw Fitzgerald recording a series of duets with pianist Ellis Larkins, released in 1950 as ''Ella Sings Gershwin''.
Fitzgerald was still performing at Granz's JATP concerts by 1955. Fitzgerald left Decca and Granz, now her manager, created Verve Records around her.
Fitzgerald later described the period as strategically crucial, saying, "I had gotten to the point where I was only singing be-bop. I thought be-bop was 'it,' and that all I had to do was go some place and sing bop. But it finally got to the point where I had no place to sing. I realized then that there was more to music than bop. Norman....felt that I should do other things, so he produced ''The Cole Porter Songbook'' with me. It was a turning point in my life."
''Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook'', released in 1956, was the first of eight multi-album Songbook sets Fitzgerald would record for Verve at irregular intervals from 1956 to 1964. The composers and lyricists spotlighted on each set, taken together, represent the greatest part of the cultural canon known as the ''Great American Songbook''. Fitzgerald's song selections ranged from standards to rarities and represented an attempt by Fitzgerald to cross over into a non-jazz audience. ''Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook'' was the only Songbook on which the composer she interpreted played with her. Duke Ellington and his longtime collaborator Billy Strayhorn both appeared on exactly half the set's 38 tracks and wrote two new pieces of music for the album: "The E and D Blues" and a four-movement musical portrait of Fitzgerald (the only Songbook track on which Fitzgerald does not sing).
The Songbook series ended up becoming the singer's most critically acclaimed and commercially successful work, and probably her most significant offering to American culture. ''The New York Times'' wrote in 1996, "These albums were among the first pop records to devote such serious attention to individual songwriters, and they were instrumental in establishing the pop album as a vehicle for serious musical exploration."
A few days after Fitzgerald's death, ''New York Times'' columnist Frank Rich wrote that in the Songbook series Fitzgerald "performed a cultural transaction as extraordinary as Elvis's contemporaneous integration of white and African-American soul. Here was a black woman popularizing urban songs often written by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians." Frank Sinatra was moved out of respect for Fitzgerald to block Capitol Records from re-releasing his own recordings in a similar, single composer vein.
Ella Fitzgerald also recorded albums exclusively devoted to the songs of Porter and Gershwin in 1972 and 1983; the albums being, respectively, ''Ella Loves Cole'' and ''Nice Work If You Can Get It''. A later collection devoted to a single composer was released during her time with Pablo Records, ''Ella Abraça Jobim'', featuring the songs of Antonio Carlos Jobim.
While recording the Songbooks and the occasional studio album, Fitzgerald toured 40 to 45 weeks per year in the United States and internationally, under the tutelage of Norman Granz. Granz helped solidify her position as one of the leading live jazz performers.
In the mid-1950s, Fitzgerald became the first African-American to perform at the Mocambo, after Marilyn Monroe had lobbied the owner for the booking. The booking was instrumental in Fitzgerald's career. The incident was turned into a play by Bonnie Greer in 2005.
There are several live albums on Verve that are highly regarded by critics. ''Ella at the Opera House'' shows a typical JATP set from Fitzgerald. ''Ella in Rome'' and ''Twelve Nights In Hollywood'' display her vocal jazz canon. ''Ella in Berlin'' is still one of her best selling albums; it includes a Grammy-winning performance of "Mack the Knife" in which she forgets the lyrics, but improvises magnificently to compensate.
Unlike any other singer you could name, Fitzgerald has the most amazing asset in the very sound of her voice: it's easily one of the most beautiful and sonically perfect sounds known to man. Even if she couldn't do anything with it, the instrument that Fitzgerald starts with is dulcet and pure and breathtakingly beautiful. As Henry Pleasants has observed, she has a wider range than most opera singers, and many of the latter, including Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, are among her biggest fans. And the intonation that goes with the voice is, to put it conservatively, God-like. Fitzgerald simply exists in tune, and she hits every note that there is without the slightest trace of effort. Other singers tend to sound like they're trying to reach up to a note - Fitzgerald always sounds like she's already there. If anything, she's descending from her heavenly perch and swooping down to whatever pitch she wants.
Henry Pleasants, an American classical-music critic, wrote this about her:
She has a lovely voice, one of the warmest and most radiant in its natural range that I have heard in a lifetime of listening to singers in every category. She has an impeccable and ultimately sophisticated rhythmic sense, and flawless intonation. Her harmonic sensibility is extraordinary. She is endlessly inventive.. . it is not so much what she does, or even the way she does it, it's what she does not do. What she does not do, putting it simply as possible, is anything wrong. There is simply nothing in performance to which one would take exception.. . Everything seems to be just right. One would not want it any other way. Nor can one, for a moment imagine it any other way.Ella Fitzgerald had an extraordinary vocal range. A mezzo-soprano (who sang much lower than most classical contraltos), she had a range of “2 octaves and a sixth from a low D or D flat to a high B flat and possibly higher”.
In 1993, Fitzgerald established the Charitable Foundation that bears her name: The Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation, which continues to help the disadvantaged through grants and donation of new books to at-risk children.
Film and television
In her most notable screen role, Fitzgerald played the part of singer Maggie Jackson in Jack Webb's 1955 jazz film ''Pete Kelly's Blues''. The film costarred Janet Leigh and singer Peggy Lee. Even though she had already worked in the movies (she had sung briefly in the 1942 Abbott and Costello film ''Ride 'Em Cowboy''), she was "delighted" when Norman Granz negotiated the role for her, and, "at the time....considered her role in the Warner Brothers movie the biggest thing ever to have happened to her." Amid ''The New York Times''' pan of the film when it opened in August 1955, the reviewer wrote, "About five minutes (out of ninety-five) suggest the picture this might have been. Take the ingenious prologue...Or take the fleeting scenes when the wonderful Ella Fitzgerald, allotted a few spoken lines, fills the screen and sound track with her strong mobile features and voice."Similar to another African-American jazz singer, Lena Horne, Fitzgerald's race precluded major big-screen success. After ''Pete Kelly's Blues'', she appeared in sporadic movie cameos, in ''St. Louis Blues'' (1958), and ''Let No Man Write My Epitaph'' (1960). Much later, she appeared in the 1980s television drama ''The White Shadow''.
She also made numerous guest appearances on television shows, singing on ''The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom'', ''The Frank Sinatra Show'', and alongside Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Mel Tormé and many others. Perhaps her most unusual and intriguing performance was of the 'Three Little Maids' song from Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operetta ''The Mikado'' alongside Joan Sutherland and Dinah Shore on Shore's weekly variety series in 1963. Fitzgerald also made a one-off appearance alongside Sarah Vaughan and Pearl Bailey on a 1979 television special honoring Bailey. In 1980, she performed a medley of standards in a duet with Karen Carpenter on the Carpenters' television program, ''Music, Music, Music''.
Fitzgerald also appeared in TV commercials, her most memorable being an ad for Memorex. In the commercials, she sang a note that shattered a glass while being recorded on a Memorex cassette tape. The tape was played back and the recording also broke the glass, asking "Is it live, or is it Memorex?" She also starred in a number of commercials for Kentucky Fried Chicken, singing and scatting to the fast-food chain's longtime slogan, "We do chicken right!"
Her final commercial campaign was for American Express, in which she was photographed by Annie Leibovitz.
Discography
Collaborations
Fitzgerald's most famous collaborations were with the trumpeter Louis Armstrong, the guitarist Joe Pass, and the bandleaders Count Basie and Duke Ellington.Fitzgerald recorded three Verve studio albums with Armstrong, two albums of standards (1956's ''Ella and Louis'' and 1957's ''Ella and Louis Again''), and a third album featured music from the Gershwin musical ''Porgy and Bess''. Fitzgerald also recorded a number of sides with Armstrong for Decca in the early 1950s. Fitzgerald is sometimes referred to as the quintessential swing singer, and her meetings with Count Basie are highly regarded by critics. Fitzgerald features on one track on Basie's 1957 album ''One O'Clock Jump'', while her 1963 album ''Ella and Basie!'' is remembered as one of her greatest recordings. With the 'New Testament' Basie band in full swing, and arrangements written by a young Quincy Jones, this album proved a respite from the 'Songbook' recordings and constant touring that Fitzgerald was engaged in during this period. Fitzgerald and Basie also collaborated on the 1972 album ''Jazz at Santa Monica Civic '72'', and on the 1979 albums ''Digital III at Montreux'', ''A Classy Pair'' and ''A Perfect Match''. Fitzgerald and Joe Pass recorded four albums together toward the end of Fitzgerald's career. She recorded several albums with piano accompaniment, but a guitar proved the perfect melodic foil for her. Fitzgerald and Pass appeared together on the albums ''Take Love Easy'' (1973), ''Easy Living'' (1986), ''Speak Love'' (1983) and ''Fitzgerald and Pass... Again'' (1976). Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington recorded two live albums, and two studio albums. Her ''Duke Ellington Songbook'' placed Ellington firmly in the canon known as the Great American Songbook, and the 1960s saw Fitzgerald and the 'Duke' meet on the Côte d'Azur for the 1966 album ''Ella and Duke at the Cote D'Azur'', and in Sweden for ''The Stockholm Concert, 1966''. Their 1965 album ''Ella at Duke's Place'' is also extremely well received. Fitzgerald had a number of famous jazz musicians and soloists as sidemen over her long career. The trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie, the guitarist Herb Ellis, and the pianists Tommy Flanagan, Oscar Peterson, Lou Levy, Paul Smith, Jimmy Rowles, and Ellis Larkins all worked with Ella mostly in live, small group settings.
Possibly Fitzgerald's greatest unrealized collaboration (in terms of popular music) was a studio or live album with Frank Sinatra. The two appeared on the same stage only periodically over the years, in television specials in 1958 and 1959, and again on 1967's ''A Man and His Music + Ella + Jobim'', a show that also featured Antonio Carlos Jobim. Pianist Paul Smith has said, "Ella loved working with [Frank]. Sinatra gave her his dressing room on ''A Man and His Music'' and couldn’t do enough for her." When asked, Norman Granz would cite "complex contractual reasons" for the fact that the two artists never recorded together. Fitzgerald's appearance with Sinatra and Count Basie in June 1974 for a series of concerts at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas was seen as an important incentive for Sinatra to return from his self-imposed retirement of the early 1970s. The shows were a great success, and September 1975 saw them gross $1,000,000 in two weeks on Broadway, in a triumvirate with the Count Basie Orchestra.
Awards, citations and honors
Fitzgerald won thirteen Grammy awards, including one for Lifetime Achievement in 1967. Other major awards and honors she received during her career were the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Medal of Honor Award, National Medal of Art, first Society of Singers Lifetime Achievement Award, named "Ella" in her honor, Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the George and Ira Gershwin Award for Lifetime Musical Achievement, UCLA Spring Sing.
Ella Fitzgerald was a quiet but ardent supporter of many charities and non-profit organizations, including the American Heart Association and the United Negro College Fund. In 1993, she established the "Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation" which continues to fund programs that perpetuate Ella's ideals.
Tributes
In 1997, Newport News, Virginia created a music festival with Christopher Newport University to honor Ella Fitzgerald in her birth city. The Ella Fitzgerald Music Festival is designed to teach the region's youth of the musical legacy of Fitzgerald and jazz. Past performers at the week-long festival include: Diana Krall, Arturo Sandoval, Jean Carne, Phil Woods, Aretha Franklin, Freda Payne, Cassandra Wilson, Ethel Ennis, David Sanborn, Jane Monheit, Dianne Reeves, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Ramsey Lewis, Patti Austin, and Ann Hampton CallawayAnn Hampton Callaway, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Patti Austin have all recorded albums in tribute to Fitzgerald. Callaway's album ''To Ella with Love'' (1996) features fourteen jazz standards made popular by Fitzgerald, and the album also features the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Bridgewater's album ''Dear Ella'' (1997) featured many musicians that were closely associated with Fitzgerald during her career, including the pianist Lou Levy, the trumpeter Benny Powell, and Fitzgerald's second husband, the double bassist Ray Brown. Bridgewater's following album, ''Live at Yoshi's'', was recorded live on April 25, 1998, what would have been Fitzgerald's 81st birthday. Patti Austin's album, ''For Ella'' (2002) features 11 songs most immediately associated with Fitzgerald, and a twelfth song, "Hearing Ella Sing" is Austin's tribute to Fitzgerald. The album was nominated for a Grammy. In 2007 ''We All Love Ella'', was released, a tribute album recorded for the 90th anniversary of Fitzgerald's birth. It featured artists such as Michael Bublé, Natalie Cole, Chaka Khan, Gladys Knight, Diana Krall, k.d. lang, Queen Latifah, Ledisi, Dianne Reeves, Linda Ronstadt, and Lizz Wright, collating songs most readily associated with the "First Lady of Song".
The folk singer Odetta's album ''To Ella'' (1998) is dedicated to Fitzgerald, but features no songs associated with her. Fitzgerald's long serving accompanist Tommy Flanagan affectionately remembered Fitzgerald on his album ''Lady be Good...For Ella'' (1994).
Fitzgerald is also referred to on the 1987 song "Ella, elle l'a" by French singer France Gall and the Belgian singer Kate Ryan, the 1976 Stevie Wonder hit "Sir Duke" from his album ''Songs in the Key of Life'', and the song "I Love Being Here With You", written by Peggy Lee and Bill Schluger. Sinatra's 1986 recording of "Mack the Knife" from his album ''L.A. Is My Lady'' (1984) includes a homage to some of the song's previous performers, including 'Lady Ella' herself. She is also honored in the song "First Lady" by Canadian artist Nikki Yanofsky.
In 2008, the Downing-Gross Cultural Arts Center in Newport News named its brand new 276-seat theater the Ella Fitzgerald Theater. The theater is located several blocks away from her birthplace on Marshall Avenue. The Grand Opening performers (October 11 & 12, 2008) were Roberta Flack and Queen Esther Marrow.
USPS stamp and Yonkers statue
There is a statue of Fitzgerald in Yonkers, the city in which she grew up. It is located southeast of the main entrance to the Amtrak/Metro-North Railroad station. On January 10, 2007, the United States Postal Service announced that Fitzgerald would be honored with her own 39-cent postage stamp. The stamp was released in April 2007 as part of the Postal Service's Black Heritage series.
Filmography
! Year ! Film ! Role ! Notes and awards ''Ride 'Em Cowboy'' Ruby Maggie Jackson Singer ''Let No Man Write My Epitaph'' Flora
References
Further reading
Nicholson, Stuart. (1996) ''Ella Fitzgerald''. Gollancz. ISBN 0-575-40032-3 Gourse, Leslie. (1998) ''The Ella Fitzgerald Companion: Seven Decades of Commentary''. Music Sales Ltd. ISBN 0-02-864625-8 Johnson, J. Wilfred. (2001) ''Ella Fitzgerald: A Complete Annotated Discography''. McFarland & Co Inc. ISBN 0-7864-0906-1
External links
The official website of the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation Ella Fitzgerald Complete Discography Ella Fitzgerald: Twelve Essential Performances by Stuart Nicholson (Jazz.com). Ella Fitzgerald at the Library of Congress Official Web Site of Ella Fitzgerald Ella Fitzgerald, The Official Ed Sullivan Show Website Redsugar's Ella page 'Remembering Ella' by Phillip D. Atteberry Todd's Ella Fitzgerald Lyrics Page Ella Swings Gently - The Ella Fitzgerald Pages Ella Fitzgerald Tribute CD Video Footage New York Times article on Ella's early years Listen to Big Band Serenade podcast, episode 6 Includes complete NBC remote broadcast of "Ella Fitzgerald & her Orchestra" from the Roseland Ballroom (or download)
Category:1917 births Category:1996 deaths Category:African American singers Category:African American female singers Category:American amputees Category:American female singers Category:American gospel singers Category:American jazz singers Category:American singers Category:American singer-songwriters Category:Bandleaders Category:Blind people Category:Burials at Inglewood Park Cemetery Category:Capitol Records artists Category:Deaths from diabetes Category:Decca Records artists Category:George Peabody Medal winners Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Torch singers Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Kennedy Center honorees Category:Musicians from Virginia Category:Pablo Records artists Category:People from Newport News, Virginia Category:People from Yonkers, New York Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Category:Swing singers Category:Traditional pop music singers Category:United States National Medal of Arts recipients Category:Vaudeville performers Category:Verve Records artists Category:Scat singers Category:Women in jazz
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Except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy, we will use the information you provide us only for the purpose of responding to your inquiry or in connection with the service for which you provided such information. We may forward your contact information and inquiry to our affiliates and other divisions of our company that we feel can best address your inquiry or provide you with the requested service. We may also use the information you provide in aggregate form for internal business purposes, such as generating statistics and developing marketing plans. We may share or transfer such non-personally identifiable information with or to our affiliates, licensees, agents and partners.
We may retain other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf. Such third parties may be provided with access to personally identifiable information needed to perform their functions, but may not use such information for any other purpose.
In addition, we may disclose any information, including personally identifiable information, we deem necessary, in our sole discretion, to comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal proceeding or governmental request.
We do not want you to receive unwanted e-mail from us. We try to make it easy to opt-out of any service you have asked to receive. If you sign-up to our e-mail newsletters we do not sell, exchange or give your e-mail address to a third party.
E-mail addresses are collected via the wn.com web site. Users have to physically opt-in to receive the wn.com newsletter and a verification e-mail is sent. wn.com is clearly and conspicuously named at the point of
collection.If you no longer wish to receive our newsletter and promotional communications, you may opt-out of receiving them by following the instructions included in each newsletter or communication or by e-mailing us at michaelw(at)wn.com
The security of your personal information is important to us. We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during registration and once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100 percent secure, however. Therefore, though we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
If we decide to change our e-mail practices, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we think appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.
If we make material changes to our e-mail practices, we will notify you here, by e-mail, and by means of a notice on our home page.
The advertising banners and other forms of advertising appearing on this Web site are sometimes delivered to you, on our behalf, by a third party. In the course of serving advertisements to this site, the third party may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser. For more information on cookies, you can visit www.cookiecentral.com.
As we continue to develop our business, we might sell certain aspects of our entities or assets. In such transactions, user information, including personally identifiable information, generally is one of the transferred business assets, and by submitting your personal information on Wn.com you agree that your data may be transferred to such parties in these circumstances.