Fred Astaire’s modesty
Sometimes the great and the famous are arrogant, or they become arrogant. But not Fred Astaire:
His perfectionism was legendary, but his relentless insistence on rehearsals and retakes was a burden to some. When time approached for the shooting of a number, Astaire would rehearse for another two weeks and record the singing and music. With all the preparation completed, the actual shooting would go quickly, conserving costs. Astaire agonized during the process, frequently asking colleagues for acceptance for his work. As Vincente Minnelli stated, “He lacks confidence to the most enormous degree of all the people in the world. He will not even go to see his rushes… He always thinks he is no good.” As Astaire himself observed, “I’ve never yet got anything 100% right. Still it’s never as bad as I think it is.”…
Extremely modest about his singing abilities (he frequently claimed that he could not sing, but the critics rated him as among the finest), Astaire introduced some of the most celebrated songs from the Great American Songbook…
Although he possessed a light voice, he was admired for his lyricism, diction, and phrasing—the grace and elegance so prized in his dancing seemed to be reflected in his singing, a capacity for synthesis which led Burton Lane to describe him as “the world’s greatest musical performer.” Irving Berlin considered Astaire the equal of any male interpreter of his songs—”as good as Jolson, Crosby or Sinatra, not necessarily because of his voice, but for his conception of projecting a song.” Jerome Kern considered him the supreme male interpreter of his songs and Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer also admired his unique treatment of their work.
I love Astaire’s dancing, but I think he reached his peak – in terms of the performance, the choreography, the inventiveness, and the mood – in his duets with Ginger Rogers. She had a synergistic effect on him.
But his solos are great even though they don’t appeal to me quite as much. It’s almost as though Astaire had trouble being without a partner (after all, he started dancing professionally in vaudeville as a child with his sister Adele), and so if he didn’t have a human partner he came up with some sort of prop to make things interesting.
I could post hundreds of wonderful clips of Astaire, but I’ll limit it to these two. First we have Astaire with a host of props in an exercise studio:
And next we have a dance in which the prop is a room and its furniture. This video shows you the filmed dance on the left, and then how it’s done on the right:
[NOTE: I learned something new today from Astaire’s Wiki entry – which is that he is of Jewish heritage on his father’s side. Both of his father’s parents were Austrian Jews who had converted to Roman Catholicism in the mid-19th-Century. A lot of this history can be found here.]
Not in this lifetime shall we see his like again. Simply astonishing.
I grew up with and have always enjoyed Fred Astaire movies. I’ve always felt that the routine with the coat rack was a tour-de-force. I read a comment once comparing Astaire’s style with Gene Kelly’s:
I thought that quote summed up their distinct styles quite well.
In my dreams I can sing and dance like Fred Astaire and play the saxophone like Lester Young, the two most graceful American artists of my lifetime.
Thanks for the post.
Here’s an example of Fred Astaire’s modesty as well as his dancing ability– Bob Hope coaxed him into performing at the 1970 Oscars, when Astaire was 71. Bob and Fred exchange some friendly banter about giving up dancing due to age; Hope signals to the orchestra to start the music, and Fred obliges with a remarkable dance– he hadn’t lost any of his grace and agility.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnrbdNjf-aw&ab_channel=Oscars
(Skip ahead to about 2:30 in the video; the first 2-1/2 minutes involve the presentation of an Oscar for a documentary)
BTW, isn’t it refreshing to remember a time when the Academy Awards were a formal black-tie event marked by the kind of class that Astaire represented rather than today’s wokeness?
As has been said, he made the hat rack look good!
Vaudeville gave us many gifts, who these days, outside of classical music, gets such training at an early age. No, they need to get a college degree instead.
T,
I like Astaire and Kelly both. I’m not sure I understand the analogy. When I see Kelly do stuff like this I know I cannot do it:
https://youtu.be/8hs6iXpInTA
Rufus T. Firefly:
Speak of the Firefly and he appears!
We wondered about you last night. Did your ears burn?
Last night?
(Off to yesterday’s comments…)
… so now I’m more up to date. I hope all is well with Spartacus and Tom Grey!
“Jerome Kern considered him the supreme male interpreter of his songs”
Here is Astaire introducing one of my favorite songs ever, written by Kern, in the movie “Swing Time”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIW_Ah0wg-w&t=65s
Aside from Astaire’s interpretation of this enduringly beautiful song there is the romantic/humorous interplay between him and Ginger Rogers.
Rufus T. Firefly,
I like them both, too.
The way I’ve always interpreted that quote is to mean that Astaire brings a smoothness to his dance routines that seems to bespeak a suave, trained sophistication. Kelly’s routines often strike me as more athletic (gymnastic) and, perhaps, jazzy; perhaps more of an everyman’s dancing style. In contrast to Fred Astaire’s routine with the coat rack, let me offer Gene Kelly’s dance with the umbrella from Singing in the Rain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1ZYhVpdXbQ
Do you think that you see some distinction between their dancing styles?
Sometimes when I watch Kelly I see the beginnings of an angularity of movement that reminds me of Bob Fosse’s work (not so much with the umbrella but in other routines); Fred Astaire never reminds me of Fosse.
That, I think, is the best way I can describe it. I’m speaking purely from personal observation. I welcome any insight that Neo, our very own dance maven, might wish to add.
I knew the room sequence had to involve a revolving set, but it was very interesting to see the side-by-side.
That must have been a challenging engineering feat.
Not to mention practicing the changes from one surface to another.
Here’s some background on the sequence.
(Includes the same video Neo embedded.)
https://www.occasionalglimpses.com/fred-astaires-revolving-room-dance-sequence-in-royal-wedding-1951/
What in the world caused Fred to dream this up in the first place?
I can’t even imagine dancing in a rotating drum – vertigo to the max!
I would like to have seen a “documentary” style clip showing exactly how it was done by drawing back enough to see the squirrel cage and camera-man, but one source that appeared to do that now shows the dreaded “This video is unavailable.”
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/fred-astaire-royal-wedding-ceiling-dance-scene-with-the-rotating-room.648574/
However, down in the comments, there is a video of the same technique as used for a Dr. Pepper commercial.
I’ve seen the hat-tree sequence many times, but I think this is the first time I’ve ever encountered the full dance routine. His handling of the props reminds me a lot of sleight-of-hand magicians.
FWIW – I have a metronome on my piano, purchased about 20 years ago, that looks just like the one in the movie.
It’s amazing how long a good design lasts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1UMthWB8oM
His peak was here.
^^ Yes. And took up skateboarding at an even later age, according to Wikipedia. A good life.
But not an Operating Thetan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSLMN6g_Od4
Zaphod – you really should lay off the Dim Sum and Tsingtao.
Kick back with a knish and a can of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic.
Beside Fred Astaire, there is only one thing that is not glued (or nailed) down: the photograph. It is interesting to see how this is dealt with.
I’m not schooled in dance as you are, so all I know to say is that no one gives me greater pleasure to watch than Fred Astaire. Every cell in his body is always in exactly the right spot, whether you’re concentrating on his feet or his navel. He’s perfect.
I remember hearing a different version of the comparison between Astaire and Kelly, something like: “When you watch Astaire dancing, you want to dress up and go out on the town. When you watch Kelly dancing, you want to get in shape.” Highlighting the athleticism of Kelly’s style, and rightly I think.
I agree with Neo that Fred and Ginger together make something much, much more than the sum of their parts. How they did that, you can describe and explain forever without coming to the end of it. The great mystery. We’re just lucky all traces of their art didn’t evaporate the moment they happened. I first saw their films some thirty years after they made them, and have seen them again often since.
I like Astaire’s solo dances too. They usually begin with an introspective mood that he then elaborates in the most good-humored way imaginable. An Astaire solo is a great chaser-away of the blues. The one at the beginning of The Band Wagon, set mostly in a penny arcade, would be my Exhibit A. The set and props and passers-by become his “partner.”
Exhibit A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbb4kEk3NbQ
Interesting. The chair is mobile early on, he’s dancing around with it… then there’s a cut, and the rest of the “mobile room” stuff occurs… it was secured to the floor between the scene cut, as he’s hanging from it later on…
}}} I like Astaire and Kelly both. I’m not sure I understand the analogy. When I see Kelly do stuff like this I know I cannot do it:
I dunno. I’m very impressed, it does require considerable skill to tap dance on roller skates, but… it’s not that much more amazing than many ice skating demonstrations I’ve seen… and any world-class dancer as Kelly was has to have a pretty good sense of balance to make the tap-dancing-on-skates easier than one might think it is.
I’ve never been interested in learning to skate that much, and I’m much too old to risk the broken bones — but in my younger days, yeah, if I’d been determined to really become GOOD at skating, I believe I could’ve developed the skill.
Another impressive thing to note, that’s with the older “hard sandy” type of skates, not ones with modern polyurethane wheels, much less in-line skates. That makes what he did even more noteworthy, either way.
Here’s some more commentary on the FA-RW scene:
https://www.bigfott.com/astaire-unwound
P.S., apparently the reason the video no longer works is because Adobe are world-class dickheads. Not content with no longer supporting Flash, they’ve made it stop working across the board, which renders a wide array of older websites unavailable any more, as they were dependent on it. >:-/
I used The Wayback Machine to access a site that appeared to have that old video, and the “flash player is no longer supported” message came up. :-/
$T!#$^#!^ Adobe dickheads.
The rotating trick was also used by Kubrick in 2001, in the centrifuge scene where Kier Dullea is running along the circle…
It’s also used in a video by Blancmange called “Love That It Is”.
@LeClerc:
Wouldn’t say no to a Knish! By preference with a bottle of Indian Kingfisher Beer since it’s pretty much an Ashkenazi Samosa to my way of thinking.
Not sure I could ever live it down down at my Lebensborn Reunions if I got caught drinking Dr Brown’s Anything… Just wouldn’t be kosher.
No matter how graceful a ballerina is, and how lightly she leaps, she always comes back down. Thus, implicitly, she has weight.
Astaire, by contrast, seems not to weigh anything. I don’t mean he weighs little. It’s that his moves imply that he does not have mass accessible by gravity. Not that he’s going to, uncontrollably, float up to the ceiling while trying to reach his coffee cup.
Weight, mass, gravity simply do not exist.
@ OBH – “Here’s some more commentary on the FA-RW scene:”
Thank you so much for looking that up!
I think it was Edward Albert who told the story of seeing a guy in the distance kicking the tires of a car and realized, just based on the gracefulness, that it was Fred Astaire.