Fred Astaire
Men In History
“I didn’t want to leave this world without knowing who my descendent was. Thankyou Michael!” — a quote from Fred Astaire about Michael Jackson.
He was one of the greatest dancers within the pages of history, and we are lucky enough today to be able to watch him dancing on film. He started dancing on the Vaudeville stage with his sister, Adele, moving into films. He appeared in (at least) 35 films and his net worth was $10 million when he died. He was Fred Astaire!
Fred Astaire was born in 1899 in Omaha, Nebraska, USA, and ‘entered’ show business at the age of five. With his sister, Adele, he performed in Vaudeville and on Broadway, and when Adele married in 1932 (retiring from the stage), Astaire headed on to Hollywood and signed a contract with RKO. One of the most successful films “Flying Down to Rio” (1933) saw the start of his partnership with Ginger Rogers. The two worked together on 10 films, “Top Hat” being one of the most memorable.
Astaire was determined to get the best possible “moving pictures” out of his films, and to do this he made sure that he had complete control over the “presentation” of the dance scenes. Astaire insisted that the dance routines were filmed in as few shots as possible using a ‘closely tracking doll camera’, with (usually) four to eight cuts, and the dancers were in full view all of the time…
