Vincente Minnelli was an American film and stage director, famous for directing such classic movie musicals as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Gigi (1958), The Band Wagon (1953), and An American in Paris (1951).
Background
Vincente Minnelli was born on February 28, 1910 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Born and baptized as Lester Anthony Minnelli in Chicago, he was the youngest of four known sons, only two of whom survived to adulthood, born to Marie Émilie Odile Lebeau and Vincent Charles Minnelli. His father was musical conductor of Minnelli Brothers' Tent Theater. His Chicago-born mother was of French Canadian descent with a strong probability of Native American lineage included via her Mackinac Island, Michigan born mother. The family toured small towns primarily in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois before settling permanently in Delaware, Ohio.
His paternal grandfather Vincenzo Minnelli and great-uncle Domenico Minnelli, both Sicilian revolutionaries, were forced to leave Sicily after the collapse of the provisional Sicilian government that arose from the 1848 revolution against Ferdinand II and Bourbon rule. Domenico Minnelli had been Vice-Chancellor of the Gran Corte Civile in Palermo at the time he helped organize the January 12, 1848 uprising there. After the Bourbon return to power Vincenzo reportedly hid in the catacombs of Palermo for 18 months before being successfully smuggled onto a New York-bound fruit steamer. While traveling as a piano demonstrator for Knabe Pianos, Vincenzo met his future wife Nina Picket during a stop in Delaware, Ohio. Although there is no confirmation of Vincenzo working at Ohio Wesleyan University, he was indeed a music teacher and composer. Both the U.S. Library of Congress and the Newberry Library in Chicago have Vincenzo (aka Vincent) Minnelli compositions in their collections.
Paternal grandmother Nina Picket, with whom Minnelli lived during his school days while his parents were touring their shows, descended from a line of teachers and civil servants, most notably early American educator Albert Picket. Albert Picket, reportedly once a student of Noah Webster's, conducted a girls' school in 1810s Manhattan and was an early member of the New York Historical Society. In 1811 he was an incorporator of The Society of Teachers of the City of New York. With his son John W. Picket he published an educational journal, The Academician, and a number of school books, including The Juvenile Expositor in 1816. After relocating to Cincinnati he was a founder of the Western Literary Institute and College of Professional Teachers, was a contemporary of William McGuffey and Calvin and Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom's Cabin) and played a role in establishing the public school system in the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. In his later years he retired to Delaware, Ohio and died there in 1850.
Education
Vincente studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Career
Minnelli came to films with a great reputation in the New York theatre as a designer: at Radio City Music Hall: with the Ziegfeld Follies, and on Very Warm for May, a Jerome Kern musical. The talent was immense, but imprecise, and Hollywood was at first uncertain how to use him. Producer Arthur Freed had invited him to MGM, but Minnelli spent two years being generally helpful before he made the inevitable step into direction.
Working usually for Freed, he coincided with the MGM musical—but only coincided. Cabin in the Sky is all-black, dwelling gloriously on Lena Horne and Ethel Waters. Meet Me in St. Louis is a period piece, more intent on personality and nostalgia than musical routines—a sort of home the atricals musical in which “The Trolley Song” is beautifully integrated with the action. Ziegfeld Follies is a series of sketches. While Yolanda and the Thief. The Pirate, and An American in Paris are willfully stylized and fantastic, inclining toward a new form that might consist only of dance, song, and color. Stunning as these pictures are in moments, the open-air musicals of Donen seem more original. The Pirate, especially, looks like the work of a man more eager to decorate than design.
As Minnelli’s musicals became less dramatically necessary—The Band Wagon, Biigadoon, Kismet—he made delightful comedies in which his rococo instinct in no way distracted one from the dry homespun of Spencer Tracy. Undercurrent was a contrived psychological movie, but often intriguing; Madame Bovary never worked as a whole, or as the dream of a bourgeois wife. But The Bad and the Beautiful was a breakthrough: it opened up a potential for sudden insights in brilliantly regulated melodrama that was one of Minnelli’s most fascinating assets. It can be seen in The Cobweb, Some Came Running, Two Weeks in Another Town, and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father—all underrated films, ostensibly lurid or soft subjects that he invested with such intense psychological detail that the narrative faults vanish. In those films, as in Lust for Life, the personal story and the visual story lock together. The use of the goldfish in The Courtship of Eddie's Father, and the emphasis on interior shape and decor in The Cobweb, may be symptomatic of Minnelli’s most lasting achievements.
Regularly, his work plunged and rose again: The Sandpiper is a dreadful film; Four Horsemen a hopeless one, saved locally by the color and by Ingrid Timlin; Goodbye Charlie has fine moments but lacks coordination. It was his first film away from MGM and marked an unexplained drying up in his output. On a Clear Day . . . , despite its mangled form on release, shows the same visual distinction and the same interest in imaginative exclusion ol outside reality, so that three films in ten years is hard to understand.
On a Clear Day . . . also returned to Minnellis persistent interest in dream experiences. There is a nice moment in Yolanda and the Thief when Frank Morgan wakes Fred Astaire from the dream sequence with the words, “When you have a nightmare you sure keep busy. True enough, and cut off from inner, imaginary feelings, Minnelli sometimes looks uninterested. Yolanda is a dull story, transformed in the dream sequences that suddenly call into being all of Minnellis fantastic control of light, color, shape, and movement. Meet Me in St. Louis is a daydream, An American in Pans a pre-text for a dream. And remember that Minnelli introduces a rather frightening nightmare into Father of the Bride. Not only do such enchanted visions recur, but Minnellis stress on style is itsell reaching out for dream: the fluid, self-sufficient sequences of fantastic imagery. That could explain the occasional feeling of indifference to narrative, just as it directs attention to his style.
In Crazy Like a Fox, S. J. Perelman included an appreciation of Vincente Minnelli that had the poker-faced disapproval of a particular tvpe of showbiz friendship. It ended with one concession to sentiment: the recollection that Minnellis work on the stage as a designer and director transcended alleged defects of character—“I owe him plenty,” admitted Perelman. And no obsessive filmgoer of the 1940s and 1950s would not echo the cry. When credits seemed to a hoy a protracted teasing of proper expectation, it dawned slowly that certain names went with certain pleasures. Those recurring names were the basis of an approach to art: George Cukor, Anthony Mann, Howard Hawks, and—the most flamboyant—Vincente Minnelli.
There was a memory of a shuddering Margaret O’Brien in the Halloween sequence of Meet Me in St. Louis; Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer in Limehouse in Ziegfeld Follies; the crane camera swooping down on Astaires nightmare dance in Yolanda and the Thief; the extraordinary profusion of the last part of An American in Paris, when plot stopped for extravaganza; the transformation in Story of Three Loves when Ricky Nelson looks into the mirror and sees Farley Granger; the puff- hall blondeuess of Lana Turner goaded by Kirk Douglas in The Bad and the Beautiful.
Minnellis career presents great problems as soon as one looks beyond that initial fondness. Do the fragments come together? Do those melodious camera movements, the most inventive conception of background action, and such ceaseless use of color, costume, and sets make him a major director? Or is he a stylist, unconcerned with subject matter, for years content to film whatever material MGM assigned him? Certainly, the loyalty to one studio seems to have been borne without the agonies that beset, say, Nicholas Ray. And Minnelli w'as eager to move into new genres; from the musical, he went on to psychological drama, classic novel, domestic comedy, Hollywood melodrama, biopic, epic. Nor is it adequate to pass him off as a ringmaster of the frivolous. For his biopic is a heartrending identification with an artist, as moving as anything in the American cinema. And the artist concerned is not Firbank or Toulouse-Lautrec—but Van Gogh, a harsh, clumsy mystic. Lust for Life has everything that is often found absent from Minnelli's work: the use of color, setting, costume, and bravura emotional acting to define a tragic human situation. Yet it was made between the property-box colorfulness of Ki.smet and an uncertain, ladylike venture into “serious” theatre—Tea and Sympathy. Perhaps inconsistency is his chief characteristic.
Physical Characteristics:
His height was 1.75 m.
Quotes from others about the person
...the greatest director of motion picture musicals the screen has ever seen.
Connections
Minnelli married Judy Garland on June 15, 1945, but the marriage ended in divorce. They had one child, Liza May Minnelli, born in 1946. Later he married Georgette Magnani on February 1, 1954, but the marriage also ended in divorce. They had one child, Christiane Nina Minnelli, born in 1955. Then he married Danica "Denise" Radosavljevic on January 15, 1962, the marriage also ended in divorce. Finally, he married Margaretta Lee Anderson on April 1, 1980, his fourth and final marriage; they remained married for six years until Minnelli's death in 1986. Anderson died in 2009 at the age of 100.
For years, there was speculation in the entertainment community that Minnelli was gay or bisexual. A biography by Emanuel Levy, Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood's Dark Dreamer, claims evidence that Minnelli did, in fact, live as an openly gay man in New York prior to his arrival in Hollywood, where the town that made him a film legend also pressured him back into the closet.