Fred Astaire [biography]
Dates: 1899-1987
Birth Date: May 10, 1899
Death Date: Jun 22, 1987
Place of Birth: Omaha, NE
Place of Death: Los Angeles, CA
Fred Astaire, the quintessence of the song-and-dance man and a dancer who fused tap dance with ballet and ballroom, was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1899, the son of an immigrant Austrian brewery employee who was also a stage-struck amateur musician. When his mother took sister Adele to New York in 1904 for professional training, young Fred came along and both were enrolled in Claude Alvienne's dancing school. Within a year he had choreographed a twelve-minute vaudeville act for the youngsters and by 1905, when Astaire was age six, they were performing professionally in New Jersey. At one point in the routine, which made use of a huge wedding cake wired with electric lights, Astaire appeared in top hat, white tie, and something like knickers, performing a tap dance in toe shoes and playing the piano; later in this zany number, after his sister had become a glass of champagne, he reappeared as a lobster. The debut was successful enough so their father could arrange an extensive vaudeville tour for a child act at $150 a week. Other tours followed, and at the age of seven he began creating his first choreographies. For six months, the brother and sister were enrolled in Ned Wayburn dancing school on West forty-fourth Street in New York during which time for a fee of $1000 Wayburn wrote for them a sketch, "A Rainy Saturday," which they played for two years in small vaudeville theatres. Two song-and-dance numbers were incorporated into the sketch and in both Astaire was called upon to do the singing; in the finale, Adele played piano. "Wayburn was a tall, heavy-set man who did not look like a dancer," Astaire recalled, "but he was kind to us and I recall that he came in a showed me some buck-and-wing steps. I was surprised that such a big man could dance." Wayburn also made comic use of the fact that Adele was taller than her brother. One week after the act premiered at the Broadway Theatre, the Morning Telegraph wrote, "Fred and Adele Astaire are a clever singing and dancing team," they were booked at Proctor's Fifth Avenue. Under the guidance of the vaudeville dancer, Aurelio Coccia, who Astaire considers to be the most influential man in his dancing career, the Astaires eventually cut the dialogue from the act, reconstructing the songs and dances, adding new ones, and having Astaire play piano. They soon had streamlined the act into a show-stopper. In their last season in vaudeville, which the brother and sister were still in their teens, they had become featured performers earning #50 a week. In 1917, the Astaires took the opportunity to move from vaudeville to the musical stage, and from then until 1932 they appeared in ten musical productions on Broadway, the most successful were George and Ira Gershwin's Lady, Be Good (1924) and Funny Face (1927), and Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz's The Band Wagon (1931). In the 1920s, while touring with three of their Broadway shows to London, Adele met and was courted by Charles Cavendish, the second son of the Duke of Devonshire; when they married in 1932, Adele agreed to retire from show business, leaving her brother to continue his career as a solo dancer and choreographer. Seeking to reshape his career, he settled on the feature role in Gay Divorce, a light and perky, unsentimental musical comedy by Dwight Taylor with songs by Cole Porter, which opened in New York in November 1932; Astaire's dancing partner in the musical was Claire Luce. In 1931, Astaire met and soon fell in love with Phyllis Livingston Potter, a woman who came from one of Boston's most aristocratic families and who had never seen him on the stage; they were married in July 1933 and had two children: Fred Jr., born in 1936, and Ava, born in 1942. In 1933, Astaire's agent, Leland Hayward worked out a Hollywood deal at RKO in which Astaire would do a film there at $1500 a week, and if the studio liked the results, it would put him in two more at a higher salary: Flying Down to Rio, marked his debut with RKO and the first of ten films with partner Ginger Rogers, which included 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). In Top Hat, which was enormously appealing to the masses and was number one at the box office, Astaire popularized the image of the male dancer as a dapperly-dressed sophisticate whose smooth-as-pudding tap dancing looked as easy as walking, his exquisite-designed and scrupulously rehearsed routines, distinguished by physical coordination and a strict sense of understatement, defied copying. Though he was indeed a superb soloist, he also perfected the art of dancing with a partner, perhaps because he always had the best and most beautiful of dancing partners, which included besides Rogers, Eleanor Powell in Broadway Melody of 1940; Rita Hayworth in You'll Never Get Rich (1941) and You Were Never Lovlier (1942); Judy Garland and Ann Miller in Easter Parade (1948), and ballet dancer Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon (1953) and Silk Stockings (1957). Beautiful women were not Astaire's only partners--the clothes tree he danced with in Royal Wedding (1951) and the cane in Blue Skies (1946) and Three Little Words (1950) were all magically animated in the hands of the great dancing man. Though Astaire often liked to collaborate with Hermes Pan, he choreographed his own dances for the camera, demanding that the camera shoot the full form of the dancer and the entire routine in a single take, thereby bringing integrity and wholesomeness to the genre of camera dance.
[For a choreographic biography of Astaire see John Meuller, Astaire Dancing Astaire Dancing (1991); for a biographical narrative of Astaire's dancing relationship with Ginger Rogers, see Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (1972); Astaire's autobiography, Steps In Time (1979); for a detailed enumeration of Astaire in books and on film, see Larry Billman, Fred Astaire: A Bio-Bibliography.]