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Eugene Curran Kelly (August 23, 1912 – February 2, 1996), better known as Gene
Kelly, was an American dancer, actor, singer, director, producer, and
choreographer.
Kelly was a major exponent of 20th century filmed dance, known for his energetic
and athletic dancing style, his good looks and the likeable characters that he
played on screen. Although he is probably best known today for his performance in
Singin' in the Rain, he dominated the Hollywood musical film from the mid 1940s
until its demise in the late 1950s. In 1999, the American Film Institute named
Kelly among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking at No. 15.
 Early life
Gene was the third son of James Kelly, a phonograph salesman, and Harriet Curran,
who were both children of Irish Roman Catholic immigrants. He was born in the
Highland Park neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and, at the age of
eight, was enrolled by his mother in dance classes, along with his older brother
James. They both rebelled, and, according to Kelly:" We didn't like it much and
were continually involved in fistfights with the neighbourhood boys who called us
sissies...I didn't dance again until I was fifteen." Kelly returned to dance on his
own initiative and by then was an accomplished sportsman and well able to take care
of himself. He graduated from Peabody High School in 1929. He enrolled in
Pennsylvania State College to study journalism but the economic crash obliged him
to seek employment to help with the family's finances. At this time, he worked up
dance routines with his younger brother Fred in order to earn prize money in local
talent contests.
In 1931 Kelly enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), to study economics
where he joined the Phi Kappa Theta fraternity and earned a Bachelor of Arts in
Economics in 1933. In 1930, his family started a dance studio on Munhall Road in
the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. In 1932, it was renamed The Gene
Kelly Studio of the Dance. A second location was opened in Johnstown, Pennsylvania
in 1933. While still an undergraduate student and later as a student at Pitt's
School of Law, Gene was a teacher at the dance studio. Eventually, though, he
decided to pursue his career as a dance teacher and entertainer full-time and so
dropped out of law school after two months. He began to focus increasingly on
performing, later claiming: "With time I became disenchanted with teaching because
the ratio of girls to boys was more than ten to one, and once the girls reached
sixteen the dropout rate was very high." In 1937, having successfully managed and
developed the family's dance school business, he moved to New York City in search
of work as a choreographer.
Stage
career
After a fruitless search, Kelly returned to Pittsburgh, to his first position as a
choreographer with the Charles Gaynor musical revue Hold Your Hats at the
Pittsburgh Playhouse in April, 1938. Kelly appeared in six of the sketches, one of
which, "La Cumparsita", became the basis of an extended Spanish number in Anchors
Aweigh eight years later.
His first Broadway assignment, in November 1938, was as a dancer in Cole Porter's
Leave It to Me as the American ambassador's secretary who supports Mary Martin
while she sings "My Heart Belongs to Daddy". He had been hired by Robert Alton who
had staged a show at the Pittsburgh Playhouse and been impressed by Kelly's
teaching skills. When Alton moved on to choreograph One for the Money he hired
Kelly to act, sing and dance in a total of eight routines. His first career
breakthrough was in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Time of Your Life, which opened
on November 11, 1939, where for the first time on Broadway he danced to his own
choreography. In the same year he received his first assignment as a Broadway
choreographer, for Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe. His future wife, Betsy Blair was
a member of the cast, they began dating and were married on October 16, 1941.
In 1940, he was given the leading role in Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey, again
choreographed by Robert Alton, and this role propelled him to stardom. During its
run he told reporters: "I don't believe in conformity to any school of dancing. I
create what the drama and the music demand. While I am a hundred percent for ballet
technique, I use only what I can adapt to my own use. I never let technique get in
the way of mood or continuity." It was at this time also, that his phenomenal
commitment to rehearsal and hard work was noticed by his colleagues. Van Johnson
who also appeared in Pal Joey recalls: "I watched him rehearsing, and it seemed to
me that there was no possible room for improvement. Yet he wasn't satisfied. It was
midnight and we had been rehearsing since eight in the morning. I was making my way
sleepily down the long flight of stairs when I heard staccato steps coming from the
stage...I could see just a single lamp burning. Under it, a figure was
dancing...Gene."
Offers from Hollywood began to arrive but Kelly was in no particular hurry to quit
New York. Eventually, he signed with David O. Selznick, agreeing to go to Hollywood
at the end of his commitment to Pal Joey, in October 1941. Prior to leaving he also
choreographed the stage production of Best Foot Forward.
Kelly did not return to stage work until his MGM contract ended in 1957, and in
1958 he directed Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical play Flower Drum Song. Early in
1960 Kelly, an ardent Francophile and fluent French speaker, was invited by A. M.
Julien, the general administrator of Paris Opera to select his own material and
create a modern ballet for the company, the first time an American received such an
assignment. The result was Pas de Dieux, based on Greek mythology combined with the
music of George Gershwin's Concerto in F. It was a major success, and led to his
being honored with the Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the French
Government.
Film
career
Selznick sold half of Kelly's contract to MGM and loaned him out to MGM for his
first motion picture: For Me and My Gal (1942) with Judy Garland. Kelly was
"appalled at the sight of myself blown up twenty times. I had an awful feeling that
I was a tremendous flop" but the picture did well and, in the face of much internal
resistance, Arthur Freed of MGM picked up the other half of Kelly's contract. After
appearing in the B-movie drama Pilot no. 5 he took the male lead in Cole Porter's
Du Barry Was a Lady opposite Lucille Ball. His first opportunity to dance to his
own choreography came in his next picture Thousands Cheer, where he performed a
mock-love dance with a mop.
He achieved his breakthrough as a dancer on film, when MGM loaned him out to
Columbia to play opposite Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl (1944), where he created a
memorable routine dancing to his own reflection. In his next film Anchors Aweigh
(1945), MGM virtually gave him a free hand to devise a range of dance routines,
including the celebrated and much imitated animated dances with Tom and Jerry, and
his duets with Frank Sinatra. This role garnered him his first and only Academy
Award nomination for Best Actor. In Ziegfeld Follies (1946) - which was produced in
1944 but not released until 1946 - Kelly teamed up with Fred Astaire - for whom he
had the greatest admiration - in the famous "The Babbitt and the Bromide" challenge
dance routine before leaving the studio for wartime service. Throughout this period
Kelly was obliged to appear in straight acting roles in a series of cheap B-movies,
now largely forgotten.
At the end of 1944, Kelly enlisted in the United States Naval Air Service and was
commissioned as lieutenant, junior grade. He was stationed in the Photographic
Section, Washington D.C., where he was involved in writing and directing a range of
documentaries, and this stimulated his interest in the production side of
film-making.
1946-1952: The
glory years at MGM
On his return to Hollywood in the spring of 1946, MGM had nothing lined up and used
him in yet another B-movie: Living in a Big Way. The film was considered so weak
that Kelly was requested to design and insert a series of dance routines, and his
ability to carry off such assignments was noticed. This led to his next picture
with Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli, the film version of Cole Porter's
The Pirate, in which Kelly plays the eponymous swashbuckler. Now regarded as a
classic, the film was ahead of its time and was not well received. The Pirate is
now best remembered for the teaming of Kelly with The Nicholas Brothers - the
leading African-American dancers of their day - in a dance routine of astonishing
virtuosity. Although MGM wanted Kelly to return to safer and more commercial
vehicles, he ceaselessly fought for an opportunity to direct his own musical film.
In the interim, he capitalised on his swashbuckling image as one of The Three
Musketeers and appeared with Vera-Ellen in the Slaughter on Tenth Avenue ballet
from Words and Music (1948). There followed Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949),
his second film with Sinatra, where Kelly paid tribute to his Irish heritage in The
Hat My Father Wore on St. Patrick's Day routine. It was this musical film which
persuaded Arthur Freed to allow Kelly to make On the Town, where he teamed for the
third and final time with Frank Sinatra, creating a breakthrough in the musical
film genre which has been described as "the most inventive and effervescent musical
thus far produced in Hollywood".
With On the Town, Stanley Donen, who Kelly had brought to Hollywood as his
assistant choreographer, received co-director credit. According to Kelly: "...when
you are involved in doing choreography for film you must have expert assistants. I
needed one to watch my performance, and one to work with the cameraman on the
timing..without such people as Stanley, Carol Haney and Jeanne Coyne I could never
have done these things. When we came to do On the Town, I knew it was time for
Stanley to get screen credit because we weren't boss-assistant anymore but
co-creators." Together, they opened up the musical form, taking the film musical
out of the studio and into real locations, with Donen taking responsibility for the
staging and Kelly handling the choreography. Kelly went much further than before in
introducing modern ballet into his dance sequences, going so far in the "Day in New
York" routine as to substitute four leading ballet specialists for Sinatra,
Munshin, Garrett and Miller.
It was now Kelly's turn to ask the studio for a straight acting role and he took
the lead role in the early mafia melodrama: The Black Hand (1949). There followed
Summer Stock (1950) - Judy Garland's last musical film for MGM - in which Kelly
performed the celebrated "You, You Wonderful You" solo routine with a newspaper and
a squeaky floorboard. In his book "Easy the Hard Way", Joe Pasternak singles out
Kelly for his patience and willingness to spend as much time as necessary to enable
the ailing Garland to complete her part.
There followed in quick succession two musicals which have secured Kelly's
reputation as a major force in the Americal musical film, An American in Paris
(1951) and - probably the most popular and admired of all film musicals - Singin'
in the Rain (1952). As co-director, lead star and choreographer, Kelly was the
central driving force. Johnny Green, head of music at MGM at the time, described
him as follows: "Gene is easygoing as long as you know exactly what you are doing
when you're working with him. He's a hard taskmaster and he loves hard work. If you
want to play on his team you'd better like hard work too. He isn't cruel but he is
tough, and if Gene believed in something he didn't care who he was talking to,
whether it was Louis B. Mayer or the gatekeeper. He wasn't awed by anybody and he
had a good record of getting what he wanted".. An American in Paris won six Academy
Awards, including Best Picture and, in the same year, Kelly was presented with an
honorary Academy Award for his contribution to film musicals and the art of
choreography. The film also marked the debut of Leslie Caron, who Kelly had spotted
in Paris and brought to Hollywood. Its dream ballet finale, lasting an
unprecedented thirteen minutes was the most expensive production number ever filmed
up to that point and was described by Bosley Crowther as being "whoop de doo ...
one of the finest ever put on the screen". Singin' in the Rain featured Kelly's
celebrated and much imitated solo dance routine to the title song, along with the
famous "Moses Supposes" routine with Donald O'Connor and the "Broadway Melody"
finale with Cyd Charisse, and while it did not initially generate the same
enthusiasm as An American in Paris, it subsequently overtook the latter film to
occupy its current pre-eminent place among critics and filmgoers alike.
1953-1957: The decline of
the Hollywood musical
Kelly, at the very peak of his creative
powers, now made what in retrospect is seen as a serious mistake. In December
of 1951 he signed a contract with MGM which sent him to Europe for nineteen
months so that Kelly could use MGM funds frozen in Europe to make three
pictures while personally benefiting from tax exemptions. Only one of these
pictures was a musical, Invitation to the Dance, a pet project of Kelly's to
bring modern ballet to mainstream film audiences which was beset with delays
and technical problems and wasn't released until 1956, when it flopped. When
Kelly returned to Hollywood in 1954, the film musical was already beginning to
feel the pressures from television, and MGM cut the budget for his next
picture Brigadoon (1954), with Cyd Charisse, forcing the film to be made on
studio backlots instead of on location in Scotland. This year also saw him
appear as guest star with his brother Fred in the celebrated "I Love To Go
Swimmin' with Wimmen" routine in Deep in My Heart. MGM's refusal to loan him
out for Guys and Dolls and Pal Joey put further strains on his relationship
with the studio. He negotiated an exit to his contract which involved making
three further pictures for MGM.
The first of these, It's Always Fair Weather, (1956) co-directed with Donen, was a
musical satire on television and advertising, and includes his famous roller skate
dance routine to "I Like Myself", and a dance trio with Michael Kidd and Dan Dailey
which allowed Kelly to experiment with the widescreen possibilities of Cinemascope.
A modest success, it was followed by Kelly's last musical film for MGM, Les Girls
(1957), in which he partnered a trio of leading ladies, Mitzi Gaynor, Kay Kendall
and Taina Elg, fittingly ending, as he had begun, with a Cole Porter musical. The
third picture he completed was a co-production between MGM and himself, the B-movie
The Happy Road, set in his beloved France, his first foray in his new role as
producer-director-actor.
1958-1985: Years of
perseverance
Although Kelly continued to make some film appearances, most of his efforts were
now concentrated on film production and directing. He directed Jackie Gleason in
Gigot in Paris, but the film was subsequently drastically re-cut by Seven Arts
Productions and flopped. Another French effort, Jacques Demy's homage to the MGM
musical: Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) in which Kelly appeared, also
performed poorly.
His first foray into television was a documentary for NBC's Omnibus, Dancing is a
Man's Game (1958) where he assembled a group of America's greatest sportsmen -
including Mickey Mantle, Sugar Ray Robinson and Bob Cousy - and reinterpreted their
moves choreographically, as part of his lifelong quest to remove the stigma of
effeminacy which surrounds the art of dance, while articulating the philosophy
behind his dance style. It gained an Emmy nomination for choreography and now
stands as the key document explaining Kelly's approach to modern dance.
Kelly also frequently appeared on television shows during the 1960s, but his one
effort at a TV series: as Father O'Malley in Going My Way (1962-1963) was dropped
after one season, although it subsequently enjoyed great popularity in Catholic
countries outside of the US. He went on to make two major TV specials: New York,
New York (1966) and produced and directed Jack and the Beanstalk (1967) which again
combined cartoon animation with live dance, winning him an Emmy Award for
Outstanding Children's Program.
In 1963 Kelly joined Universal Pictures for a two year stint which proved to be the
most unproductive of his career to date. He joined 20th Century Fox in 1965 but had
little to do - partly due to his decision to decline assignments away from Los
Angeles for family reasons. His perseverance finally paid off with the major
box-office hit A Guide for the Married Man (1967) where he directed Walter Matthau
and a major opportunity arose when Fox - buoyed by the returns from The Sound of
Music (1965) - commissioned Kelly to direct Hello Dolly! (1969), again directing
Matthau along with Barbara Streisand, but which unfortunately failed to recoup the
enormous production expenses.
In 1970 he made another TV special: Gene Kelly and 50 Girls and was invited to
bring the show to Las Vegas, which he duly did for an eight-week stint - on
condition he be paid more than any artist had hitherto been paid there. He directed
veteran actors James Stewart and Henry Fonda in the comedy western The Cheyenne
Social Club (1970) which performed very well at the box-office. In 1974 he appeared
as a narrator in the surprise hit of the year That's Entertainment! and
subsequently directed and co-starred with his friend Fred Astaire in the sequel
That's Entertainment, Part II (1976). It was a measure of his powers of persuasion
that he managed to coax the seventy-seven year old Astaire - who had insisted that
his contract rule out any dancing, having long since retired - into performing a
series of song and dance duets, evoking a powerful nostalgia for the glory days of
the American musical film. He continued to make frequent TV appearances and in
1980, appeared in an acting and dancing role opposite Olivia Newton John in Xanadu
(1980), a bizarre and expensive flop which has since attained a cult following. In
Kelly's opinion "The concept was marvellous but it just didn't come off".In the
same year he was invited by Francis Ford Coppola to recruit a production staff for
American Zeotrope's One from the Heart (1982). Although Coppola's ambition was for
Kelly to establish a production unit to rival the legendary Freed Unit at MGM, the
film's failure put paid to this idea. His last major film assignment was as
executive producer and co-host for That's Dancing! (1985) - a celebration of the
history of dance in the American musical.
Personal
life
Kelly was married to Betsy Blair for 16 years (1941 - 1957) and they had one child,
Kerry. She divorced Kelly in 1957. In 1960, Kelly married his choreographic
assistant Jeanne Coyne who had divorced Stanley Donen in 1949 after a brief
marriage. He remained married to Coyne from 1960 till her death in 1973 and they
had two children Bridget and Tim. He was married to Patricia Ward from 1990 until
his death in 1996.
Gene Kelly was a lifelong Democratic Party supporter with strong progressive
convictions, which occasionally created difficulty for him as his heyday coincided
with the McCarthy era in the US. In 1947, he was part of the Hollywood delegation
which flew to Washington to protest at the first official hearings by the House
Committee on Un-American Activities. His first wife, Betsy Blair, was suspected of
being a Communist sympathiser and when MGM, who had offered Blair a part in Marty
(1955), were considering withdrawing her under pressure from the American Legion,
Kelly successfully threatened MGM with a pullout from It's Always Fair Weather
unless his wife was restored to the part. He used his position on the board of
directors of The Writer's Guild of America on a number of occasions to mediate
disputes between unions and the Hollywood studios, and although he was frequently
accused by the Right of championing the unions, he was valued by the studios as an
effective mediator.
A gregarious and highly articulate individual, he retained a lifelong passion for
sports and relished competition. With his wife, he organised weekly parties at his
Beverly Hills home which were renowned for an intensely competitive and physical
version of charades.
Kelly died on February 2, 1996, in Beverly Hills, California, after suffering two
strokes, at the age of 83.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Gene
Kelly - Manifesting Generator - Biography
