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Ginger Rogers
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Ginger Rogers (July 16, 1911 – April 25, 1995) was an Academy Award-winning American film and stage actress, dancer and singer. In a film career spanning 50 years, she made a total of 73 films, and is now principally celebrated for her role as Fred Astaire's romantic interest and dancing partner in a series of ten Hollywood musical films that revolutionized the genre. She's also among the list, ranking #14, on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars.
rs was born Virginia Katherine McMath in Independence, Missouri, the daughter of William Eddins McMath, of Scottish ancestry, and his wife Lela Owens, of Welsh ancestry.
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Encyclopedia
Ginger Rogers (July 16, 1911 – April 25, 1995) was an Academy Award-winning American film and stage actress, dancer and singer. In a film career spanning 50 years, she made a total of 73 films, and is now principally celebrated for her role as Fred Astaire's romantic interest and dancing partner in a series of ten Hollywood musical films that revolutionized the genre. She's also among the list, ranking #14, on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars.
Early life
Rogers was born Virginia Katherine McMath in Independence, Missouri, the daughter of William Eddins McMath, of Scottish ancestry, and his wife Lela Owens, of Welsh ancestry. Her mother separated from Rogers' father soon after her birth, and mother and daughter went to live with Rogers's grandparents, Walter and Saphrona Owens, in nearby Kansas City. Rogers' parents fought over her custody, with her father even kidnapping her twice. After the parents divorced, Rogers stayed on with her grandparents while her mother wrote scripts for two years in Hollywood.
Ginger was to remain close to her grandfather (much later, when she was already a star in 1939, she bought him a home in Sherman Oaks, California (5115 Greenbush Ave) so that he could be close to her while she was filming at the studios).
Several of Rogers' cousins had a hard time pronouncing her first name, shortening it to "Ginya".
When Rogers was nine years old, her mother married John Logan Rogers. Ginger took the name of Rogers, although she was never legally adopted. They lived in Fort Worth, Texas. Her mother became a theater critic for a local newspaper, the Fort Worth Record.
As a teenager, Rogers thought of teaching school, but with her mother's interest in Hollywood and the theater, her young exposure to the theater increased. Waiting for her mother in the wings of the Majestic Theatre, she began to sing and dance along to the performers on stage.
Vaudeville
Rogers' entertainment career was born one night when the traveling vaudeville act of Eddie Foy came to Fort Worth and needed a quick stand-in. She entered and won a Charleston dance contest and then hit the road with a vaudeville tour. She and her mother toured for four years. During this time, her mother divorced John Rogers, but kept his surname.
At 17, Rogers married Jack Culpepper, a singer/dancer/commedian/recording artist of the day who worked under the name Jack Pepper (according to Ginger's autobiography, she knew Culpepper when she was child as her cousin's boyfriend). They formed a shortlived vaudeville double act known as "Ginger and Pepper". The marriage was over within months, and she went back to touring with her mother. When the tour got to New York City, she stayed, getting radio singing jobs and then her Broadway theater debut in a musical called Top Speed, which opened on Christmas Day, 1929.
Film career
1929-1933
Rogers' first movie roles were in a trio of short films made in 1929 — Night in the Dormitory, A Day of a Man of Affairs, and Campus Sweethearts.
Within two weeks of opening in Top Speed, Rogers was chosen to star on Broadway in Girl Crazy by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, the musical play widely considered to have made stars of both Ginger and Ethel Merman. Fred Astaire was hired to help the dancers with their choreography. Her appearance in Girl Crazy made her an overnight star at the age of 19. In 1930, she was signed by Paramount Pictures to a seven-year contract.
Rogers would soon get herself out of the Paramount contract -- under which she had made films at Astoria Studios in Astoria, Queens -- and move with her mother to Hollywood. When she got to California, she signed a three-picture deal with Pathé, which resulted in three forgettable pictures. She landed singing and dancing bit parts for most of 1932 and was named one of fifteen "WAMPAS Baby Stars". She then made her screen breakthrough in the Warner Brothers film 42nd Street (1933). She went on to make a series of films with RKO Radio Pictures and, in the second of those, Flying Down to Rio (1933), she worked with Dolores del Rio and again with Fred Astaire.
1933-1939: Astaire and Rogers
Rogers was most famous for her partnership with Fred Astaire. Together, from 1933 to 1939, they made nine musical films at RKO (a tenth was made later at MGM), and in so doing, revolutionized the Hollywood musical, introducing dance routines of unprecedented elegance and virtuosity, set to songs specially composed for them by the greatest popular song composers of the day. To this day, "Fred and Ginger" remains an almost automatic reference for any successful dance partnership.
Croce, Hyam and Mueller all consider Rogers to have been Astaire's finest dance partner, principally due to her ability to combine dancing skills, natural beauty and exceptional abilities as a dramatic actress and comedienne, thus truly complementing Astaire: a peerless dancer who sometimes struggled as an actor and was not considered classically handsome. The resulting song and dance partnership enjoyed a unique credibility in the eyes of audiences, as bluntly expressed by Katharine Hepburn: "She gives him sex, he gives her class." Most of the films in which the two appeared had several very difficult numbers to be rehearsed dozens of times. Of the 33 partnered dances she performed with Astaire, Croce and Mueller have highlighted the infectious spontaneity of her performances in the comic numbers "I'll Be Hard to Handle" from Roberta (1935), "I'm Putting all My Eggs in One Basket" from Follow the Fleet (1936) and "Pick Yourself Up" from Swing Time (1936). They also point to the use Astaire made of her remarkably flexible back in classic romantic dances such as "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" from Roberta (1935), "Cheek to Cheek" from Top Hat (1935) and "Let's Face the Music and Dance" from Follow the Fleet (1936). For special praise, they have singled out her performance in the "Waltz in Swing Time" from Swing Time (1936), which is generally considered to be the most virtuosic partnered routine ever committed to film by Astaire. She generally avoided solo dance performances: Astaire always included at least one virtuoso solo routine in each film, while Rogers only performed one: "Let Yourself Go" from Follow the Fleet (1936).
Although the dance routines were choreographed by Astaire and his collaborator Hermes Pan, both have acknowledged Rogers' input and have also testified to her consummate professionalism, even during periods of intense strain, as she tried to juggle her many other contractual film commitments with the punishing rehearsal schedules of Astaire, who made at most two films in any one year. In 1986, shortly before his death, Astaire remarked: "All the girls I ever danced with thought they couldn't do it, but of course they could. So they always cried. All except Ginger. No no, Ginger never cried". John Mueller sums up Rogers' abilities as follows: "Rogers was outstanding among Astaire's partners not because she was superior to others as a dancer but because, as a skilled, intuitive actress, she was cagey enough to realize that acting did not stop when dancing began...the reason so many women have fantasized about dancing with Fred Astaire is that Ginger Rogers conveyed the impression that dancing with him is the most thrilling experience imaginable". According to Astaire, "Ginger had never danced with a partner before. She faked it an awful lot. She couldn't tap and she couldn't do this and that ... but Ginger had style and talent and improved as she went along. She got so that after a while everyone else who danced with me looked wrong."
Rogers also introduced some celebrated numbers from the Great American Songbook, songs such as Harry Warren and Al Dubin's "The Gold Diggers' Song (We're in the Money)" from Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), "Music Makes Me" from Flying Down to Rio (1933), "The Continental" from The Gay Divorcee (1934), Irving Berlin's "Let Yourself Go" from Follow the Fleet (1936) and the Gershwins' "Embraceable You" from Girl Crazy and "They All Laughed (at Christopher Columbus)" from Shall We Dance (1937). Furthermore, in song duets with Astaire, she co-introduced Berlin's "I'm Putting all My Eggs in One Basket" from Follow the Fleet (1936), Jerome Kern's "Pick Yourself Up" and "A Fine Romance" from Swing Time (1936) and the Gershwins' "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" from Shall We Dance (1937).
After 1939
In 1939, Rogers requested a break from musicals, saying, "I don't want to make a musical for the next year. Don't get me wrong—I'm not ungrateful for what musicals have accomplished for me. However. for the last four years, I've been doing the same thing with minor variations." After breaking with Astaire, her first role was opposite David Niven in Bachelor Mother.
In 1941, Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her starring role in 1940's Kitty Foyle. She enjoyed considerable success during the early 1940s, and was RKO's hottest property during this period. However, by the end of the decade, her film career was in decline. Arthur Freed reunited her with Fred Astaire for the last time in The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) which, while very successful, failed to revive Rogers' flagging career and commentators of the time were keen to remark, somewhat unkindly that the 1949 film highlighted how much the elfin girl of the 1930s had disappeared to be replaced by a robust framed, athletic woman.
She continued to obtain more minor film roles throughout the 1950s. Ginger Rogers starred in Monkey Business (1952) with Cary Grant, in the same year she also starred in We're Not Married! which featured Marilyn Monroe. She then played Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! on Broadway in 1965. In 1956, Ginger Rogers was the debut act at the grand opening of Hotel Riviera in Havana, Cuba, dictator Fulgencio Batista's collaboration project with gangster Meyer Lansky.
In later life, Rogers remained on good terms with Astaire: she presented him with a special Academy Award in 1950, and they were co-presenters of individual Academy Awards in 1967. In 1969 she had the lead role in a production of Mame from the book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in the West End of London, arriving for the role on the Liner QE2 from New York, her docking heralded the maximum pomp and ceremony at Southampton. The production ran for 14 months and featured a Royal Command Performance for Queen Elizabeth the Second. The Kennedy Center honored Ginger Rogers in December 1992. This event, which was shown on television, was somewhat marred when Astaire's widow, Robyn Smith -- who permitted clips of Astaire dancing with Rogers to be shown for free at the function itself -- was unable to come to terms with CBS Television for broadcast rights to the clips.
Personal life
In 1940, Rogers purchased a 1000-acre (4 km²) ranch between Shady Cove, Oregon and Eagle Point, Oregon, along the Rogue River, just north of Medford. The ranch, named the 4-R's (for Rogers's Rogue River Ranch), is where she would live, along with her mother, when not doing her Hollywood business, for 50 years. The ranch was also a dairy, and supplied milk to Camp White for the war effort during World War II. Rogers loved to fish the Rogue every summer. She sold the ranch in 1990 and moved to Medford.
Rogers, who was an only child, lived for much of her life with her mother, Lela Rogers (1891–1977), who was a newspaper reporter, scriptwriter, and movie producer. Lela was also one of the first women to enlist in the Marine Corps, and was a founder of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.
Rogers' mother "named names" to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and both mother and daughter were staunchly anti-Communist. They had an extremely close mother-daughter relationship — Rogers's mother even denied Rogers's father visitation rights after their divorce.
- Rogers' first marriage was to her dancing partner Jack Pepper (real name Edward Jackson Culpepper) on March 29, 1929. They divorced in 1931, having separated soon after the wedding.
- In 1934, she married her second husband, actor Lew Ayres (1908–1996). They separated quickly and were divorced in 1941.
- In 1943, she married her third husband, Jack Briggs, a Marine. They divorced in 1949.
- In 1953, Rogers married her fourth husband, lawyer Jacques Bergerac, who was 16 years her junior. Bergerac became an actor and then a cosmetics company executive. They divorced in 1957 and he soon remarried actress Dorothy Malone.
- Her fifth husband was director and producer William Marshall. They married in 1961 and divorced in 1971.
Rogers was good friends with Lucille Ball — a distant cousin on Rogers' mother's side — for many years until Ball's death in 1989, at the age of 77. Ball did not seem to share Rogers' political views, but evidently still valued her friendship, as did Bette Davis, a Democrat who definitely did not share her views and called her a "moralist", but still professed to enjoy her company. Ginger Rogers appeared with Lucille Ball in an episode of Here's Lucy on November 22, 1971, where, with Lucie Arnaz, Rogers gave a demonstration of the Charleston, in the famous "high heels".
Rogers was a cousin of actress/writer/socialite Phyllis Fraser (whose acting career was brief).
Rogers was not Rita Hayworth's cousin, as has been reported. Hayworth's maternal uncle, Vinton Hayworth, was married to Rogers' maternal aunt, Jean Owens.
Rogers would spend the winters in Rancho Mirage, California, and the summers in Medford, Oregon. She died on April 25, 1995, of congestive heart failure, at the age of 83, in Rancho Mirage, and was cremated. Her ashes are interred in the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California.
Portrayals of Rogers
No film portrayals have been made of Ginger Rogers, most likely because Fred Astaire stipulated in his will that no film representations of him were to ever be made. As Rogers' career history is inevitably linked to Astaire, it is unlikely an accurate portrayal could be made of her on film.
- No portrayal was made of her in The Aviator (2004), in spite of the fact that many of her fellow actresses who, like her, dated Howard Hughes, were portrayed. Rogers autobiography, "Ginger-My Story", published in 1991 has the author frankly tell the reader that Hughes was very intent on marriage to Rogers and was very much the persistent suitor.
- Likenesses of Astaire and Rogers, apparently painted over from the Cheek to Cheek dance in Top Hat, are in the Lucy in the Skies section of the Beatles film Yellow Submarine (1968).
- Rogers' image is one of many famous woman's images, of the 1930s and 1940's, to feature on the bedroom wall in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, a gallery of magazine cuttings, pasted on to the wall and created by Anne and her sister Margot while hiding from the Nazis. When the house became a museum, the gallery the Frank sisters created was preserved under glass. Rogers' image is one of the larger and more prominent, which clearly indicates her global and mass appeal amongst the young of the time.
- A musical about the life of Rogers, entitled Backwards in High Heels, premiered in Florida in early 2007.
Quotes
About Rogers
Filmography
Features
(*): performances with Fred Astaire
Short subjects
- A Day of a Man of Affairs (1929)
- A Night in a Dormitory (1930)
- Campus Sweethearts (1930)
- Office Blues (1930)
- Hollywood on Parade (1932)
- Screen Snapshots (1932)
- Hollywood on Parade No. A-9 (1933)
- Hollywood Newsreel (1934)
- Screen Snapshots Series 16, No. 3 (1936)
- Show Business at War (1943)
- Battle Stations (Narrator, 1944)
- Screen Snapshots: The Great Showman (1950)
- Screen Snapshots: Hollywood's Great Entertainers (1954)
Television
External links
- Fred Astaire: Steps in Time, 1959, multiple reprints.
- Arlene Croce: The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, Galahad Books 1974, ISBN 0-88365-099-1
- Hannah Hyam: Fred and Ginger - The Astaire-Rogers Partnership 1934-1938, Pen Press Publications, Brighton, 2007. ISBN 978-1-905621-96-5
- John Mueller: Astaire Dancing - The Musical Films of Fred Astaire, Knopf 1985, ISBN 0-394-51654-0
- Ginger Rogers: Ginger My Story, New York: Harper Collins, 1991
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