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Gene Kelly caricature 2012

By Chris Dinsdale

August 23, 2012 - Hollywood song and dance man Gene Kelly was born 100 years ago. The athletic, charismatic Kelly was a dominant force in Hollywood musical films while the genre was at its height in the 1940s-50s. Thanks to movies such as Singin’ in the Rain and An American in Paris, he is credited with almost single-handedly making the ballet form commercially acceptable to film audiences.

As a young man, Gene Kelly's overriding ambition was to be a Major League baseball player: "It's true! I wanted to be a shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates", he is on record as saying. And when fate decreed that he would instead be remembered as one of the most exciting and innovative dancers in the history of the Hollywood musical, it was his athletic build -- "like a blocking tackle" and "strong as an ox" -- to which he ascribed his success. Comparing himself to his elegant contemporary Fred Astaire, Kelly insisted: "If I put on a white tails and tux, I still looked like a truck driver." If Astaire was the Cary Grant of dance, argued Kelly, then he himself was the Marlon Brando. Co-stars and studio bosses would have concurred. Kelly, who gave up law school to help run the family dance tutoring business in depression-era Pittsburgh, before moving to New York in pursuit of work as a choreographer, was known as a hard taskmaster by his fellow actors and had a reputation for being uncompromising with producers; his frequent run-ins with the head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, who would many times have preferred more commercially safe ventures, were well-known within the industry. Tony Martin, husband of dancer Cyd Charisse, said he always knew when his wife had been working with Kelly -- as opposed to the smooth Astaire -- because she came home covered in bruises. In perhaps his most celebrated film, Singin' in the Rain (1952), Kelly made Debbie Reynolds rehearse so hard her feet would bleed. But he applied the same punishing schedule to his own performance, famously getting off his sick bed to record the solo dance sequence in the downpour, splashing through puddles and twirling round lampposts with a temperature of 103 degrees F.

From Anchors Aweigh (1942), the first of his three pairings with Frank Sinatra -- and where he broke new ground by dancing with a cartoon mouse -- to An American in Paris (1951), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, the athletic, charismatic Kelly was a driving force in a genre that was at its height. He had got onto the Broadway stage -- where he met the first of his three wives, Betsy Blair -- in the late 1930s and had proved so impressive in the lead role of Pal Joey in 1940 that offers from Hollywood soon flooded in. For over a decade he made the kind of feel-good films the post-war, pre-television generation delighted in -- Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon (1954) among them -- but by the 1960s his best work was behind him. He took part in television tributes and made guest appearances on long-running American TV shows such as The Muppets and The Love Boat, with one final musical film role, alongside Olivia Newton-John, in Xanadu (1980), a box-office flop. After a series of strokes in the mid-1990s, Eugene Curren Kelly died at his home in Beverley Hills, California, on February 2, 1996, at the age of 83. His obituary in the New York Times the following day mourned the passing of a "dancer of vigour and grace".

Sources
PUBLISHED: 26/07/2012; STORY: Susan Shepherd; PICTURES: Bob Hoare
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