RIP Cyd Charisse
Cyd Charisse, the famed dance partner of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in many of those lively Technicolor musicals of the 1940s and ’50s, died Tuesday. She was 86.
She was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Monday after suffering an apparent heart attack, her publicist, Gene Schwam, told the Associated Press.
Charisse was born Tula Ellice Finklea on March 8, 1922, in Amarillo, Texas. She earned the nickname Sid - when she became a performer, it was changed to the less masculine and more exotic Cyd - because her older brother couldn’t say “sister.” She actually started taking dancing lessons to build up her strength after a battle with polio.
She started out as a teen with the famed Ballet Russe. Classically trained, she could dance anything, from a pas de deux in 1946’s “Ziegfeld Follies” to the lowdown Mickey Spillane satire of 1956’s “The Band Wagon” (with Astaire), according to the AP.
She also created a popular song-and-dance partnership on TV and in nightclub appearances with her husband, singer Tony Martin.
Charisse broke into the movies when star David Lichine was hired by Columbia Pictures for a ballet sequence in a 1943 Don Ameche-Janet Blair musical, “Something to Shout About,” according to the AP.
The movie didn’t do gangbusters, but the ballet sequence attracted a lot of attention, and Charisse (then billed as Lily Norwood) began receiving film offers.
“I had just done that number with David as a favor to him,” she wrote in “The Two of Us,” her 1976 autobiography with Martin. “Honestly, the idea of working movies had never once entered my head. I was a dancer, not an actress. I had no delusions about myself. I couldn’t act - I had never acted. So how could I be a movie star?”
Still, she signed a seven-year contract at MGM, the studio that really cranked out the lavish musicals back in the day.
Charisse signed on at MGM as the studio was positioning itself as king of musicals. It had contracts with directors, choreographers, composers, conductors and a symphony-size orchestra, along with two of cinema’s greatest male dancers: Astaire and Kelly.
In his 1959 memoir “Steps in Time” “Astaire, who danced with her in “The Band Wagon” and “Silk Stockings,” called Charisse “beautiful dynamite.”
The 1952 classic “Singin’ in the Rain” marked a breakthrough in her career.
When MGM was dissatisfied with another dancer who had been cast, Charisse took over the role and danced with Kelly in the “Broadway Melody” climax, according to the AP. She amazed everyone in the famous sequence in which her 25-foot Chinese silk scarf billows through the air (with the help of a wind machine).
Charisse also danced with Kelly in “Brigadoon,” ”It’s Always Fair Weather” and “Invitation to the Dance.” She didn’t get the chance to appear with Kelly in the 1951 Academy Award winner “An American in Paris”; she was pregnant, so the part went to Leslie Caron.
In 1957, “Silk Stockings” marked the end of her cinematic dancing career. Movie musicals had fallen out of favor, so MGM dismantled its great collection of talent.
Charisse continued to appear in dramatic films, and made several in Europe, according to AP. She and Martin took their musical act to Las Vegas and elsewhere. In 1992, she made her Broadway debut, taking over the starring role as the unhappy ballerina in the musical version of “Grand Hotel.”
“I’ve done about everything in show business except to play on Broadway,” Charisse said in a 1992 AP interview. “I always hoped that I would one day. It’s the World Series of show business. If anybody tells you they’re not intimidated, they’re lying.”
She is survived by two sons, Nico Charisse and Tony Martin Jr., and two grandchildren, according to Newsday. Our thoughts are with them.
To read Charisse’s AP obituary, click here.
To read the Newsday obit, click here.
To go to her IMDB.com page, click here.
-BAM
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