The 1953 MGM musicalThe Band Wagonstars Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse as professional dancers named Tony Hunter and Gabrielle Gerard. He is an aging hoofer, she a young ballerina, and it has been decided that they must dance together, perform together, in a new Broadway show. The idea is mutually terrifying: each thinks the other the more brilliant, the greater artist; each thinks the other opposed to the partnership; each believes that they will look ridiculous together. He is afraid that at the very least she is much too tall for him. So when they meet for the...

When I first began to study dance history several decades ago, most books on the subject presented the history of ballet as a sequence of more or less cause-and-effect events involving various influential people and a few important dance works. From these books I learned that ballet was European, elite, and popular among the aristocracy from at least the time of Louis XIV, who loved to dance himself and who founded his own ballet schools so that ballet could move from being something performed by amateurs in a ballroom to a form of professional theatrical exhibition. Another of ballet’s many...

What do the following actors have in common: Donald Cook, Greta Garbo, Eleanor Powell, Fred Astaire, Vera Zorina, Ann Miller, Vivien Leigh, Maureen O’Hara, Maria Ouspenskaya, Loretta Young, Cyd Charisse, Stan Laurel, Tamara Toumanova, Ivan Kirov, and Margaret O’Brien? The answer, for the purposes of this book, is naturally that they all played ballet dancers in Hollywood films. Some of the names on the list are those of actual or erstwhile ballet dancers—Vera Zorina, Tamara Toumanova, Cyd Charisse—who had backgrounds in theatrical concert dance. Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, and Ann Miller are also dancers, although they are not...

The number of classical Hollywood films with male ballet artists as protagonists can probably be counted on one hand:The Mad Genius(1931), with John Barrymore and Donald Cook, explicitly “based in some respects upon the life and work of Serge Diaghileff”;Shall We Dance(1937), a Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers vehicle in which Astaire plays a tap-dancing American ballet dancer masquerading as a Russian; andSpecter of the Rose(1946), written, produced, and directed by Ben Hecht, about an American dancer who is purportedly “a genius” but who is also psychotic. In addition, as discussed in the previous chapter,...

Hollywood films were representing the profession of ballet with considerable iconographic consistency by the late 1940s, marking it as a form of highbrow art to which its practitioners were fanatically devoted and dedicated, their overriding ambition, whether male or female, to dance and keep dancing. But, as we have seen, often Hollywood’s ballet protagonists either danced not at all (Grand Hotel[1932],Days of Glory[1944]), only a little (The Mad Genius[1931],Waterloo Bridge[1940]), on “hastily tutored toes” (Maureen O’Hara inDance, Girl, Dance[1940], Margaret O’Brien inThe Unfinished Dance[1947]), or with the help of trained...

On October 9, 1949, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet opened its first American season ever at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, with its own opulent full-length production of Tchaikovsky’sThe Sleeping Beauty. Ninette de Valois’ British company was presented by impresario Sol Hurok, who had long been a supporter of ballet as popular entertainment but who had lately been having some bad luck with the companies he handled in the United States. According to one eyewitness chronicler of the event, dance historian Mary Clarke, the “Sadler’s Wells in New York was more than a smash hit. It was...

In 1965 and again in 1968,Timemagazine devoted cover stories to ballet.¹ In the first case, the focus was on Rudolf Nureyev, who had defected in 1961 and had rapidly become one of the biggest male ballet stars the world had seen. His partnership with Britain’s reigning but “aging”prima ballerina assoluta, Margot Fonteyn, made them “the hottest little team in show biz,” the article reports, he a “glittering young prince in the first bloom of creative life,” she the “alabaster beauty of elegant refinement,” a “dying swan in the last flutter of a shining career.” As superstars, Fonteyn...