Sugar Ray Robinson, posing in a fighting stance at a gym, circa 1950.
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1952
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1956
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1940
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1948
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1948
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1951
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1969
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Gene Kelly was born on on August 23, 1912 in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was the third son of James Patrick Joseph Kelly, a phonograph salesman, and his wife Harriet Catherine Curran. His father was Canadian-born and loved sports, especially hockey. Yet, he was also influenced by his mother's love of the theater.
Eugene attended St. Raphael Elementary School in the Morningside neighborhood of Pittsburgh and graduated from Peabody High School at age 16. He entered Pennsylvania State College as a journalism major, but the 1929 crash forced him to work to help his family. In 1931 Kelly enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh to study economics. After that Kelly was admitted to the University of Pittsburgh Law School.
Kelly served as a teacher at the studio in the Squirrel Hill, which was opened by his family, during his undergraduate and law student years. In 1931 he was approached by the Beth Shalom Synagogue in Pittsburgh to teach dance, and to stage the annual Kermesse. The venture proved a success, Kelly being retained for seven years until his departure for New York. Kelly eventually decided to pursue a career as a dance teacher and full-time entertainer.
In 1937 he left for New York, and was confident enough of his talent to believe that he would find work. He found a job during his first week in New York. Kelly's big break came in 1940 when he was cast as the lead in the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey.
The show was a hit and Kelly attracted the attention of producer-songwriter Arthur Freed, who convinced his boss, Hollywood studio executive Louis B. Mayer, to see the show. Mayer liked what he saw and told Kelly that he would like to have him under contract for the MGM studio. But it was Mayer's nephew, David O. Selznick, who signed Kelly to a contract in 1942. After six months, Kelly's contract was sold to MGM and he worked for MGM for the next 16 years.
His first Hollywood film was "For Me and My Gal" in 1942, in which he starred opposite Judy Garland. It was she who insisted that Kelly have the role, and she tutored him in how to act for the wide screen. After a couple of years doing stock musicals, Kelly made a breakthrough with "Cover Girl" in 1944.
Gene Kelly established his reputation as an actor and dancer, but his contribution to the Hollywood musical includes choreography and direction. His experiments with dance and with film technique include combining the two, as demonstrated in such films as "Anchors Aweigh" and "Invitation to the Dance." He also made use of special effects, as in the "Alter-Ego" number in "Cover Girl", where he danced with his reflection, or in the split-screen dance of "It's Always Fair Weather." His first attempts at film choreography relied on the established formulas of the film musical, but subsequently, particularly in the three films he co-directed with Stanley Donen, he developed a flexible system of choreography for the camera that took into account camera setups and movement, and editing. Kelly consciously integrated dance into film in order to help the audience gain insight into the types of characters he played.
Kelly often played a guy who feels that the best way to get what he wants is to impress people. In "The Pirate" the actor Serafin pretends he is a treacherous pirate in order to win Judy Garland's heart, but it is the lowly actor that she really wants. In "An American in Paris" Kelly plays an aggressive painter, and in "It's Always Fair Weather" he portrays a cool and sophisticated New Yorker. Yet, underneath each of these characters' masks are the charming and clever "true" selves, which are expressed wittily through song and dance.
Though Kelly's characters are naturally high-spirited, they also have a somewhat sad aspect and tend to brood about their loneliness at key moments in the films. Kelly expresses the loneliness in dances that are almost meditations on the characters' feelings. After The isolation of his character is emphasized by the anonymity of the other dancers as well as the disappearance of Vera-Ellen. The ballet in "An American in Paris" serves a similar thematic purpose. The "Alter-Ego" dance in "Cover Girl" expresses Kelly's anxiety over losing his girlfriend, and the squeaky-board dance number in "Summer Stock" is a rumination on his new feeling for Judy Garland's character. As he matured, his characters took on greater dimension, responding to the anxiety of city living, falling in love, and being lonely by distilling such experiences into dance.
And while most of his audiences were not really aware of Kelly's sophisticated techniques thus the magic virtually all found him uniquely appealing as a leading man. Nowhere was he more engaging than in 1952's "Singin' in the Rain." One of the all-time great movie musicals, and perhaps the film most associated with Kelly, this comedy illustrates the late-1920s transition from silent pictures to "talkies. " Singin' in the Rain" showcased the considerable acting, singing, and dancing gifts of Debbie Reynolds and Donald O'Connor, but it is Kelly who dances away with the movie. His rendition of the title song has become an icon of American entertainment; Kelly makes a driving rain his partner, communicating the joy in movement at the heart of all his performances.
Gene Kelly will always be remembered for his incredible contribution - through dance performance, choreography, and photography to the genre of the movie musical. While he had some success in nonmusical films "Christmas Holiday", "Marjorie Morningstar", "Inherit the Wind", his legacy lies in dance.
Gene Kelly was a dancing genius, his many innovations transformed the Hollywood musical and he is credited with almost single-handedly making the ballet form commercially acceptable to film audiences.
Moreover, Gene Kelly received a lot of awards, but the most prominent of them is the Academy Honorary Award in 1952 for his career achievements. He later received lifetime achievement awards in the Kennedy Center Honors, and from the Screen Actors Guild and American Film Institute. In 1999, the American Film Institute also numbered him 15th in their Greatest Male Stars of Classic Hollywood cinema list.
Eugene was raised as a Roman Catholic, and he was a member of the Good Shepherd Parish and the Catholic Motion Picture Guild in Beverly Hills, California. However, after becoming disenchanted by the Roman Catholic Church's support for Francisco Franco against the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War, he officially severed his ties with the church in September 1939. This separation was prompted, in part, by a trip Kelly made to Mexico in which he became convinced of the Church’s failure in helping the poor. After his departure from the Catholic Church, Kelly became an agnostic and had previously described himself as such.
Kelly was a lifelong supporter of the Democratic Party. His period of greatest prominence coincided with the McCarthy era in the United States. In 1947, he was part of the Committee for the First Amendment, the Hollywood delegation that 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 sympathizer and when United Artists, who had offered Blair a part in Marty, were considering withdrawing her under pressure from the American Legion, Kelly successfully threatened MGM's influence on United Artists with a pullout from "It's Always Fair Weather" unless his wife was restored to the part.
Quotations:
I didn't want to be a dancer. I just did it to work my way through college. But I was always an athlete and gymnast, so it came naturally.
I wanted to do new things with dance, adapt it to the motion picture medium.
I think dancing is a man's game and if he does it well he does it better than a woman.
Kelly’s personality seems cold and aggressive. Whereas Astaire’s basic reticence makes an intriguing contrast with his virtuosity as a dancer, the recurring portentousness in Kelly the dancer - that corny slow turn he loved - seems stamped with the harsh, calculating cheerfulness that exults in ringing up the curtain in Singin’ in the Rain to expose Jean Hagen’s Bronx accent. Too often, Kellv’s teeth glared out at us, as the filling for a smile, and "The Pirate" is a nice, malicious portrait of brittle phoniness. Gene Kelly was also a fluent french speaker.
Kelly married three times. His first marriage was to the actress Betsy Blair in 1941. They had one child, Kerry, and divorced in April 1957. In 1960 Kelly married his choreographic assistant Jeanne Coyne. Kelly and Coyne had two children, Timothy and Bridget. This marriage lasted until Coyne's death in 1973. Kelly's third marriage was to Patricia Ward in 1990, and it lasted until Kelly's death in 1996.
Betsy Blair was an American actress of film and stage, long based in London.
Jeanne Coyne was a Broadway dancer, choreographer and actress.
