Background
Charisse, Cyd was born on March 8, 1921 in Amarillo, Texas, United States. She was the daughter of a ballet enthusiast who made her take dancing lessons.
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1945
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1947
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1952
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1980
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Charisse, Cyd was born on March 8, 1921 in Amarillo, Texas, United States. She was the daughter of a ballet enthusiast who made her take dancing lessons.
She joined Colonel de Basil's Ballet Russe. After small parts in Something to Shout About (43, Gregorv Ratoff) and Mission to Moscow (43, Michael Curtiz), she had a brief spot as the ballerina in Ziegfeld Follies (46, Vincente Minnelli). Thereafter she played in a number of musicals, often in dance cameos: The Harvey Girls (45, George Sidney); Till the Clouds Roll By (46, Richard Whorf); Fiesta (47, Richard Thorpe); Words and Music (48, Norman Taurog); and Singin' in the Rain (52, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly). By then, her dancing carried her as an actress in Sombrero (53, Norman Foster); The Band Wagon (53, Minnelli); Brigadoon (54, Minnelli); It’s Always Fair Weather (55, Donen and Kelly); Silk Stockings (57, Rouben Mamoulian); Party Girl (58, Nicholas Ray). She appears at events still, but has done nothing worthwhile since the ex-wife in Two Weeks in Another Town (62, Minnelli).
She also starred in the following movies: The Unfinished Dance (47, Henry Koster); Tension (49, John Berry); East Side, West Side (49, Mervvn Le Roy); Mark of the Renegade (51, Hugo Fregonese); The Wild North (52, Andrew Marton). But in the nightclub dance in Party Girl and all her dancing in Silk Stockings she is as sensual and moving as most actresses have managed to be with words. In Silk Stockings, her rapturous introduction to expensive lingerie conveys emotions denied to her as an actress; while in Party Girl her dancing discloses the scarlet woman invisible in the ostensibly dramatic moments.
Warlords of Atlantis (78, Kevin Conner); Portrait of an Escort (80, Steven Hilliard Stern); and Swimsuit (89, Chris Thomson), while remaining an icon of old-fashioned glamour.
Charisse was an honorary member of the National Federation of Republican Women and campaigned for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 United States presidential election and Richard Nixon in 1968.
Exceptionally tall, austere in features but elegant in the legs, she is perhaps the greatest female movie dancer. Her acting is like the songs in Marx Brothers films, though there were attempts to make the public accept her in straight parts.
Quotes from others about the person
Fred Astaire: "She was beautiful dynamite. When you dance with her, you stayed danced."
She married Nico Charisse, a ballet instructor, with whom she opened a dance school in Hollywood (she subsequently married singer Tony Martin).
