Movie star Ginger Rogers was born on this date, July 16, in 1911. Also born July 16, though 4 years earlier was another star of the same period, Barbara Stanwyck. See my column on the Examiner.com for today's Barbara Stanwyck birthday tribute.
Yes, there were those movies with that Astaire guy, but I'm a sucker for the younger Ginger Rogers myself, 1933 Ginger Rogers to be specific: the girl with the monocle in 42nd Street and who breaks into pig latin while singing "We're in the Money" at the beginning of Gold Diggers of 1933. She was pretty good as the lead in later comedies as well, especially in Bachelor Mother (1939) with David Niven, but also 5th Ave Girl (1939) and Tom, Dick, and Harry (1941), all of which are pretty funny movies that have held up well.
Ginger Rogers on a 1935 Dixie Premium - Click the image to see many others
And then there was the dancing. Over on things-and-other-stuff.com we have a pretty strong profile on Ginger Rogers by Susan M. Kelly, which is well-worth reading as a whole, though here are some excerpts where Ginger moves her feet:
Ginger’s stage career began with one of the classic performing clichés…a performer can’t go on and an unknown substitutes. In this case, the performer was a child in the vaudeville dance team of Eddie Foy and his children. Ginger had learned the Charleston from Eddie Foy, Jr. so she stepped in to fill the void and the rest, as they say, is history. The Charleston would play another key role in Ginger’s career several years later when, at the tender age of 14, she won a Texas state Charleston contest. The prize was a four-week vaudeville tour, which Ginger promptly turned into twenty-one.
By 1931, with her mother as her constant companion, Ginger had moved her vaudeville act to New York where she also began to make some radio and film appearances. She debuted on Broadway in 1929 in a show called “Top Speed” and soon moved on to George and Ira Gershwin’s “Girl Crazy”. Ginger was a hit, singing what would become Gershwin classics, including “Embraceable You” which was written especially for her. She signed a seven year contract with Paramount Picture’s New York office and spent the next year making movies during the day and hitting the stage at night.
...Ginger once again found herself filling in for a missing actress when she was called in to take over as the second female lead in “Flying Down to Rio” (1933). The film also happened to feature a young dancer named Fred Astaire, and by pure happenstance the most famous dance team in the history of film was born. Fred and Ginger would eventually make ten musical films together, helping to take some of the sting off of the Great Depression. “Top Hat” (1935) was their biggest success, breaking box office records at Radio City Music Hall and earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture.
Again, that's just a small portion of the entire Ginger Rogers profile by Susan M. Kelly. What better day to read more than Ginger's birthday?
