Gene Kelly - Wikipedia

Thank you my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that August 23 is the anniversary of the birth of WWII US Navy veteran, American dancer, actor of film, stage, and television, singer, film director, producer, and choreographer Eugene Curran Kelly.

Images:
1. Gene Kelly, full-length portrait, in mid-air dance maneuver, facing left.
2. Gene Kelly's first family wife Elizabeth [Betsy] and daughter Kerry born in 1942.
3. US Navy LT Gene Kelly 1945.
4. Gene Kelly with his daughter Kerry [left] and 2nd wife Jean Coyne.

Background from memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.music.tdabio.119/default.html
"Dates: 1912-1996
Birth: Aug 23, 1912 at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Death: Feb 2, 1996 at Beverly Hills, California
Gene Kelly, tap dancer, choreographer, and film director who helped to perfect tap dance as an art form, extending its narrative and dramatic expression to the medium of film, was born Eugene Curran Kelly, the third of five children (in descending order, Joan, James, Gene, Louise, and Fred). His father, the Canadian-born Irishman James Patrick Kelly, was a sales executive with Columbia Phonograph Company; his mother, Harriet (Curran) Kelly, as a hobby, performed with a Pittsburgh stock theater company. Both sets of grandparents came from Ireland. As a schoolboy he excelled at the competitiveness of ice hockey and other sports. Insecure about his small stature, he compensated by becoming a fierce sportsman, combining athleticism with ruthless competitiveness. At age eight and at his mother's insistence, he was enrolled with his older brother James in the Fairgreaves School of Dance. Remembering his growing up, brother Fred remembered, "We three little boys (James, Gene, and Fred) would leave home for dancing class dressed up beautifully, and we'd come home in rags. Dancers were thought of as sissies, and the neighborhood guys would lay in wait for us. Jim was very tough and he'd fight, or Gene would start the fight and Jim would finish it. Jim was our protector. But it was sort of our daily routine. Fighting, that was the style in Pittsburgh in those days." His mother finally gave in and did not send them back to dancing school.

After spending his first year of high school at the Sacred Hearts Academy, Kelly then went to Peabody High School, where he was a star halfback on the football team and also played basketball and hockey. He wanted to be a ball player, a priest, a lawyer, but was a natural dancer and had a great singing voice and (before his voice changed) had a wonderful tenor singing "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling." His interest in dancing did not gel until he was fifteen and became interested in girls, whom he noticed favored boys who could dance. "My brother taught me how to tap dance," he says of his brother Fred, whose help he sought in 1929 when the brothers worked up some dancing routines and entered talent contests to pick up extra money, and performed in Cap and Gown revues. Prior to graduating from Peabody High School, he entered Pennsylvania State College, but during the Depression his father was relieved of a job, and thus Gene returned home, where he found a job as a YMCA gymnastics instructor. One year later, he entered the University of Pittsburgh, studying law, graduating in 1933 with a B.A. degree. During the years of study and working his way through college, he took jobs as a stage and dance coach at YMCA summer camps. By senior year he was known for his performances in the university's Cap and Gown productions. After graduation, he joined his mother in running a dance school, later named the Gene Kelly Studios of the Dance. The school, directed by his mother, was so successful a second one was opened in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, where Kelly taught tap and ballet full-time.

In the summer of 1937, Kelly went to New York to seek work as a choreographer. It took almost a year before a job came his way, not in New York but at the Pittsburgh Playhouse to stage the musical revue Hold Your Hats, in which he also appeared in six sketches and performed one solo, "La Cumparsita," a piece that would form the basis for his elaborate Spanish dance in Anchors Aweigh eight years later. New opportunities now began to present themselves. Robert Alton, who was hired as dance director of the Cole Porter Broadway musical, Leave It To Me (1938) cast Kelly in a small dancing role as a member of a six-member male chorus. Next came a spot as an actor-dancer-singer in the John Murray Anderson revue One For the Money (1939), and then a job as a summer-stock choreographer, which led to an audition for the role of Harry, the hopeful hoofer in William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life (1939). The production ran twenty-two weeks, won a Pulitzer Prize, and established Kelly as an actor-dancer; the role made him realize he could make a characterization dancing.

Kelly's first job on Broadway as a choreographer was Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshow; directed by John Murray Anderson; Kelly choreographed for sixteen chorus girls, one of whom, Betty Blair, he would later marry. Kelly's first most significant break was as an actor was when he was cast in the leading role of Joey Evans-- an ingratiating cad who uses people, especially women, in his unscrupulous pursuit of success-- in John O'Hara's Broadway musical comedy Pal Joey (1940), with music and lyrics by Rodgers and Hart, direction by George Abbott and dance direction by Robert Alton. Though the role was of a man who was completely amoral and received waves of hate coming from the audience, "I'd smile at them and dance and it would relax them," Kelly reminisced." It was interesting to be able to use the character to manipulate the audience." Wrote John Martin in the New York Times of his performance: "If Kelly were to be judged exclusively by his actual performance of dance routines that fall to him, he would still be a good dancer, but when his dancing is seen in this fuller light he becomes an exceptional one. A tap dancer who can characterize his routines and turn them into an integral element of an imaginative theatrical whole would seem to be pretty close, indeed, to unique." When interviewed about his concept for dancing, Kelly explained that he did not believe in conformity to any school of dancing but rather the dancing should be shaped by the drama and the music. And that while ballet technique was basic, the technique should never get in the way of mood or continuity. This concept would remain the basis for his work in films, which was about to begin.

After choreographing Best Foot Forward on Broadway (1941) with Danny Daniels and the sixteen-year-old Stanley Donen as his assistant, Kelly made his film debut playing the vaudevillian hoofer Harry Palmer in the Vicente Minelli-directed musical For Me and My Gal (1942), starring Judy Garland and featuring actor-dancer George Murphy. Next came DuBarry Was A Lady (1943), in which he played the role of a nightclub dancer who becomes involved in a dream sequence which transforms him into a French revolutionary swashbuckler. For the wartime all-star musical Thousands Cheer (1943), Kelly choreographed his own material, portraying an army private who, confined to his barracks and given cleanup duties; he lightens the job by imagining the mop to be a girl and waltzes around the floor with the mop to the tune, "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."

During his early years in film, Kelly was compared with James Cagney who had played the role of George M. Cohan in the film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1943). The comparison was apt, as both dancers of Irish descent had been influenced by the strutting song-and-dance style of Cohan. As Kelly remarked: "Cohan set the style for the American song-and-dance man-- a tough, cheeky, Irish style. Cohan wasn't a great dancer but he had wonderful timing and a winning personality . . . . Cohan was the American Theatre up until the impact of Eugene O'Neil, and I have a lot of Cohan in me. It's an Irish quality, a jaw-jutting, up-on-the-toes cockiness-- which is a good quality for a dancer to have."

Kelly proved his choreographic ability of a purely cinematic kind in the Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin musical Cover Girl (1944), in which Kelly found a genuinely talented dance partner in Rita Hayworth (Cansino). For this film, the nineteen-year-old Stanley Donen worked as assistant to dance director Seymour Felix. The "Alter Ego" dance, which used double-exposure film technique to create the effect of Kelly in conflict with himself, was a technical tour de force in which Kelly invented two dances that could be synchronized, using a fixed-head camera in order to get the precision, and with Donen calling out the timings for the cameraman. They worked a month on the dance and shot it in four days, with more time spent editing the double-printed footage. The collaboration set in motion, says Donen biographer Stephen Silverman, "a magical combination of Gene Kelly's charisma and Stanley Donen's chutzpah."

Anchors Aweigh (1945) starred Kelly and Frank Sinatra as two sailors (they danced one song and tap dance routine that Kelly taught Sinatra, with seventy-three takes for the scene. Kelly was next seen in a segment of the musical extravaganza Ziegfeld Follies (1946) dancing with Fred Astaire in "The Babbitt and the Bromide," playing a pair of glib gentlemen who meet from time to time throughout their lives to trade clichés of greetings and challenge each other in tap dance steps. It was two years before Ziegfeld Follies was shown, by which time Kelly had been in and out of the United States Navy. When he returned from war service (1945-46), MGM offered him Living in a Big Way (1947), in which he devised several routines, including "Fido and Me," in which he dances with an amazingly well-trained dog. The Pirate (1948), directed by Vicente Minelli, cast him as a carnival actor on tour in the Caribbean who assumes the identity of an infamous pirate in order to impress a girl, Judy Garland. In that film's "Be A Clown" finale, Kelly and the Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold, perform a knockabout routine that contained only the most clichéd of tap steps but which was flashily acrobatic.

Kelly's role as D'Artagnan in The Three Muscateers (1948) reiterated his penchant for choreography that included leaps, jumps and flourishes. It was only in Words and Music (1948) in which his staging of "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" (the centerpiece of On Your Toes ballet that had been choreographed by George Balanchine in 1936) shows a favor for jazz dancing in which rhythms of the feet are absorbed up into the body: In the original version, Ray Bolger in the role of the Hoofer, danced himself into exhaustion in his attempt to elude capture by a group of gangsters. Kelly shortened the ballet from eleven to seven minutes. In the process, he truncated some of the lyrical passages and instead playing up the dramatic substance, and nearly inventing a new story of a tough guy in a low-life section of New York who falls for a pretty street girl (played by Vera-Ellen) who is pursued by a former boyfriend, a jealous hood, who shoots and kills her.

On the Town (1949) provided the perfect vehicle for Kelly to explore character through dance and to exploit the movement of camera in site-specific works that realized the full cinematic potential of camera and dancing body. Street scenes included the dancing of Carol Haney and Alex Romero; with Kelly's choreography that integrated tap and ballet. Kelly was seen in sterling advantage in his solo in "You Wonderful You," in Summer Stock (1950), in which he discovers a stage board that squeaks and exploits it rhythmically; spreads a piece of newspaper on the stage and uses it in somewhat the same way soft-shoe dancers use sand; it was an effecting demonstration of how the intimacy of camera and introspection of character can be visually engaging, fore-grounding the fullest potential of rhythm dancing. While An American in Paris (1951) was a triumph not so much in tap but in ballet choreography in the "American in Paris Ballet" finale, it was Singin' in the Rain (1952), which paired Kelly with Donald O'Connor and Debby Reynolds, and told the story of a silent screen movie star having to become a sound star, that Kelly (with Stanley Donen) made an indelible mark in the movie musical—the number was "Singin' in the Rain," a cinematic choreography for camera and dancing body, in which the giddily happy and newly love-struck Kelly skips along the sidewalk in the rain, climbing lamppost, letting a drainpipe of rainwater cascade on his face, splashing around in puddles, and spiraling into the street as if motored by the handle of his umbrella.

Kelly's style of tap dancing, rooted in Irish jig and clog, resurrects, (n personality, manner, and musical structure, George M. Cohan's bragadiccio style of strutting: cocky, propulsive and animated (because of the forward-moving energy put into the steps), the choreography organized around neat six-bars-and two-bars break structure; the speed; the non-subtle execution (heavy, in large part from the squareness and solidity of his bodily structure) materializes in Kelly an all-American man and transforms him into a youthful exuberant, athletic streetwise male dancer.

Sources: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010); Rusty Frank, Tap!: the greatest tap dance stars and their stories 1900-1955 (1990); Tony Thomas, That's Dancing! (1985)]"

Gene Kelly (1912-1996) dancer/actor
"Eugene Curran Kelly (23rd August 1912 - 2nd February 1996) was an American dancer, actor of film, stage, and television, singer, film director, producer, and choreographer. He was known for his energetic and athletic dancing style, his good looks, and the likable characters that he played on screen."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRwqef_vu0Q

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He was a very talented man who sings, dance and acted. He stared in one my favorite movies " Singing in the Rain". This an awesome share.

Maj Marty Hogan Great dancer, singer, and actor.