Word: ginger
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...weeks of rehearsal before every film, dozens of takes, worn-out shoes, bleeding feet. In 1981, Astaire looked back on his career for a TIME story I wrote. (I've borrowed some of that piece for this one). He told Correspondent Martha Smilgis that making the Fred-and-Ginger films was like "running the four-min. mile for six months. I'd lose 15 lbs. during rehearsal. But then you'd get in a winning groove - a kind of show-business dream sequence where you can't do anything wrong. The choreography was a mutual effort: Hermes Pan, Ginger, even...
...Stan Laurel. Thus the famous pronouncement on Astaire's first screen test: "Can't act. Can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little." But oh, how he danced! That was evident from his second film, "Flying Down to Rio" (1933), when he was paired with a perky chorine named Ginger Rogers. Between then and 1939 Astaire and Rogers made eight films - and movie history...
...FRED AND GINGER...
...Hepburn who said of Astaire-Rogers: "He gives her class. She gives him sex." Truth to tell, Fred gave Ginger more class than she gave him sex. Rogers was a showbiz cutie, just 21 when they were first paired (he was 33), and radiating healthy self-awareness more than eroticism; as Arlene Croce wrote in her vibrantly evocative critique "The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book," Ginger was "like a clever puppy who knows it's being watched." And, except metaphorically, there was no sex in their films; they typically played lovers who never got to kiss (except...
...titles of their RKO movies changed - "Flying Down to Rio," "The Gay Divorc?e," "Top Hat," "Roberta," "Follow the Fleet," "Swing Time," "Shall We Dance," "Carefree," "The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle" - but their roles were pretty constant. Fred was nature's nobleman, Ginger the plucky girl who made good by dancing well. It didn't matter that the films' plots were aggressively silly, the dialogue often inane. The musical numbers had a formula too: Fred courting Ginger, pursuing her in song and dance, while she ponders her ethical or emotional reservations to dancing-romancing; he approaches, she retreats...