Of all Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s great musical stars, Frederick Austerlitz (1899-1987) was technically the first. He did not star for the studio until 1940, but he made his first appearance seven years earlier, in Dancing Lady, playing himself. He stands alongside Gene Kelly as the two greatest dancer-choreographers in cinema.
After a very successful stage career, dancing with his sister Adele, Fred Astaire sought a Hollywood career after Adele got married and retired. He was 34 when he signed with RKO, who immediately loaned him to MGM, for Dancing Lady.
In the years that followed, Astaire and a new partner, Ginger Rogers, made nine pictures at RKO, a number of which are considered the high points of the 1930s musical. Astaire innovated in a number of areas, not least his insistence that dances be photographed with full-length shots, without cutaways to the face or feet.
When the Rogers partnership ended in 1939 with The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, Astaire starred for the first time at MGM, dancing with Eleanor Powell in Broadway Melody of 1940.
Then came perhaps Astaire’s most successful post-Rogers collaboration, when he danced in two pictures with the much-underrated Rita Hayworth at Columbia. He was back at MGM in 1945, dancing with Gene Kelly for the only time in Ziegfeld Follies, then starring in Vincente Minnelli’s strange Yolanda and the Thief.
After an attempted retirement, Astaire was lured back to MGM to replace the injured Gene Kelly in Easter Parade, after which he was reunited with Rogers in The Barkeleys of Broadway. He made five more musicals at Metro during the next ten years: Three Little Words, Royal Wedding (in which he danced on the ceiling), The Belle of New York (in which he danced on clouds), The Band Wagon (in which he and Cyd Charisse performed ‘Dancing in the Dark’ for the ages) and Silk Stockings (the final film in which he danced like Fred Astaire).
Astaire turned to straight acting from 1959, with the exception of Finian’s Rainbow (1968), where he anguished over Francis Ford Coppola’s inept style of shooting dance numbers. He made his final film in 1981.
