Died: 17 June, 2008, in Los Angeles, aged 86.
CYD Charisse was the leggy beauty whose balletic grace made her a memorable partner for Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in classic MGM musicals such as Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon and Brigadoon.
Charisse came of age in a sparkling era of Hollywood musicals, and though she had some dramatic film roles, it was in musicals that she achieved her lasting renown. That fame later helped power a successful song-and-dance partnership with her husband, Tony Martin, in nightclubs and on television.
In his 1959 memoir Steps in Time, Astaire called Charisse "beautiful dynamite". She was a striking presence on film: slender and graceful with jet-black hair. She stood 5ft 7in, but in high heels and full-length stockings – a familiar costume for her – she appeared much taller.
She made her film debut in 1943 under the name Lily Norwood in Something to Shout About with Don Ameche and Janet Blair, then spent almost a decade performing in small roles, sometimes anonymously, before she got her big break. That came with Singin' in the Rain, released in 1952.
Written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, the film established her as one of Hollywood's most glamorous and seductive talents.
Set during the dawn of talking pictures, Singin' in the Rain starred Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds and Jean Hagen. Charisse appeared in only one of the film's many indelible dance sequences, but one was enough. During the Broadway Melody Ballet, opposite Kelly, she was both sultry vamp and diaphanous dream girl.
A year later, The Band Wagon brought Charisse her first leading role. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, with a book by Comden and Green and songs by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, the film starred Astaire, Charisse, Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray.
Astaire played a fading Hollywood song-and-dance man hoping to make a comeback on Broadway who finds himself cast in a show opposite a snooty ballerina (Charisse). The couple do not see eye to eye until they take a nighttime carriage ride through a moonlit Central Park and wind up embracing languorously to the strains of Dancing in the Dark.
One of the most famous sequences from the film, if not in the history of dance on film, is The Girl Hunt Ballet, in which Charisse plays the vamp to Astaire's private-eye stage character.
In Brigadoon (1954), also directed by Minnelli and adapted from the 1947 Broadway show by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Kelly and Van Johnson played American tourists who stumble on a mysterious Scottish village that materialises only once every 100 years. Kelly falls hard for a beautiful villager, Fiona (Charisse). They danced to The Heather on the Hill.
Cyd Charisse was born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Texas. She began taking dance lessons as a little girl. Her many name changes began, so the story goes, when her brother had trouble pronouncing "sister" and settled for "Sid".
While still a teenager, she was sent to California for professional dance training and quickly became a member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a touring troupe, adopting the name Felia Sidorova.
She was on a European tour when she met Nico Charisse, a handsome young dancer and dance instructor. They married in Paris when she was 18. In 1942, they had a son, Nicky.
By the early 1940s, Charisse had been spotted by studio scouts and her first film roles – as Lily Norwood – followed. (She also appeared anonymously in 1943 as a ballerina in Mission to Moscow.) In 1946, MGM, by then the king of Hollywood musicals, signed her to a contract and gave her minor roles in several films, including The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By and Ziegfeld Follies, in which she danced a brief opening sequence with Astaire. When she was chosen to appear in Ziegfeld Follies, the producer Arthur Freed preferred the name Charisse to Norwood.
The next year, Charisse played a ballerina once again in The Unfinished Dance, which featured the child star Margaret O'Brien as a dance student.
Charisse was reunited with Kelly in the 1955 Comden and Green musical It's Always Fair Weather and was teamed with Fred Astaire in Silk Stockings (1957). In the latter, an update of the Greta Garbo vehicle Ninotchka, she played an icy Soviet functionary who is sent to Paris, where she meets and is romanced by a Hollywood producer (Astaire). Needless to say, she melts for Fred as they sing and dance to Cole Porter songs including All of You and Fated to Be Mated. It was the twilight of the Hollywood musical.
In November 2006, Charisse was one of the recipients of the National Medal of Arts presented by the US president, George Bush at the White House.
Looking back on her work with Kelly and Astaire during a 2002 interview, Charisse said that her husband, Tony Martin, whom she married in 1948, a year after her divorce from Nico Charisse, always knew whom she had been dancing with. "If I was black and blue," she said, "it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn't have a scratch."
In a 1992 interview, she remembered dancing with Astaire to Michael Kidd's demanding choreography in Silk Stockings and said admiringly: "Fred moved like glass."
As it turned out, Silk Stockings was her last major musical. She appeared in a few more movies, chiefly in dramatic roles in films such as Party Girl (1958) and Two Weeks in Another Town (1962). She and Martin took their nightclub act to Las Vegas and other cities. Her last film was an Italian drama, Private Screenings (1989).
Charisse made her belated Broadway debut in 1992 in Grand Hotel, when she replaced Liliane Montevecchi in the leading role of a famous but ageing ballerina in 1920s Berlin. "I think that in all my dancing I play a role," she said that year. "To me, that's what dancing is about. It's not just steps."
She is survived by her husband, Tony Martin; their son, Tony Jnr; and her son, Nicky, by her first marriage.
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