Gene Kelly: Highly Talented Dancer

Gene Kelly was born on August 23, 1912 in a working class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was a dancer, actor, director, and choreographer that brought a different approach to the dance and production world. Thus, he was one of five children, including two brothers and two sisters. While he was growing up, instead of playing baseball with the neighborhood friends he decided to take dance lessons due to his moms influence. Kelly attended Peabody High School and continued his education at Pennsylvania State College. However, he studied economics throughout college but finding a job was difficult during that time during the Depression (Krebs). During his college career he taught at a local dance studio to help pay for his education, while performing with his brother Fred, with where they then performed in a theater for children at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934 (Overview of Gene Kelly).

Kelly was an incredibly gifted dancer with his own style that eventually flourished his career as a dancer, actor, director and choreographer.

He always had an unusual and imaginative dance routine floating around in his head. “I don’t really know why I clicked, I didn’t want to be a dancer, and I just did it to work my way through college. But I was always an athlete and gymnast, so it came naturally,” stated Kelly. Also stated by Kelly, “In the 1930’s, when I started, Martha Graham was the only dancer doing anything modern but she did it all to classical music. I couldn’t see myself doing Swan Lake every night, and I wanted to develop a truly American Style”

(Krebs).
By 1932, at the age of twenty, he took over his mother’s dance school and renamed it to Gene Kelly’s Studio of the Dance (Overview of Gene Kelly). In the late 1930s he finally made his way to the Broadway stage starring in small roles including Leave It to Me! and One For the Money. His first job was in New York in 1938 as a Broadway chorus boy in Leave it To Me. Then in 1940 he starred in Pal Joey, which won its first stardom on Broadway. This was the first stardom he won on Broadway in which he sang, danced, acted, choreographed and directed (Krebs). During this performance MGM executive, Louis B. Mayer, recognized Kelly’s unforgettable performance and offered him a movie contract with his studio. He accepted and made his first film in For Me and My Gal (Gene Kelly Biography). Directly after accepting his contract with the studio he married his first wife Betsy Blair in 1941 (Overview of Gene Kelly).
Kelly was known as the king of musicals in the 1940’s and 1950’s because he brought athleticism, grace and masculinity into his musicals. He also left for Hollywood to bring a new liveliness to dance on film and change the outlook of movie musicals (Krebs). In fact, he was always compared to another famous film dancer, Fred Astaire, although he was easy to differentiate due to his unique style. Furthermore, he brought dance into real life in his movies, for most of the performances he dressed in casual clothing and in common every day settings. Additionally, he once explained, “all of my dancing came out of the idea of the common man.” Although it is hard to imagine, he eventually joined the air force in 1944, which unfortunately did not last long in his case considering dancing was his passion (Gene Kelly Biography). John Martin, a critic at The New York Times, stated, “he is not only glib-footed, but he has a feeling for comment and content that give his dancing personal distinction and raise it several notches as a dancing art.” Following, another critic stated, “for once, a dance on the screen is not merely a specialty but actually develops character and advances plot (Krebs).
Next, in 1945 he danced a duet with Jerry, a cartoon mouse, that was a new and different upcoming to movies. This routine, Anchors Aweigh, was a unique and very popular duet performed between a real human and animation (Gene Kelly Biography). He had a hard time convincing MGM to spend $100,000 and two months to shoot an eight-minute number. His ideas brought color and intricate dance steps for himself and for his cartoon characters, which required long hours in a laboratory to process different types of work (Krebs). Also, an interesting and different ballet routine performed by sailors was a popular hit in 1949, starring Frank Sinatra. At such a young age Gene was already working with big name actors (Gene Kelly Biography). Let alone, he never saw other dancers as a threat and never compared himself to others; the purpose for different styles of dance was made for a reason (Krebs).
Furthermore, he later choreographed the movie An American in Paris that received an honorary Academy Award “in appreciation of his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, and most specifically for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film” (Gene Kelly Biography). This film won eight Academy Awards, including best picture of the year, and a special Oscar for Kelly for his contributions to screen choreography. The most intact part of the film was a seventeen-minute ballet sequence. Many of the costumes, sets and dance movements for the ballet were borrowed from many well-known artists such as, Dufy, Van Gogh and Utrillo (Krebs).
His most well known film Singin’ in the Rain skyrocketed in 1952; this film was inspired by the way children like to play in the rain (Gene Kelly Biography). He performed this role with Debbie Reynolds, who had never sung or dance before but stated, “I learned a lot from Gene. He is a perfectionist and a disciplinarian, the most exacting director I’ve worked for.” Also, this was one of the first twenty-five films chosen by the Library of Congress for its National Film Registry of significant motion pictures (Krebs). Even through all of his success his first marriage seemed to come to an end in 1957. Although his first marriage seemed to fall down the drain, he found Jeanne Coyne, who is also a dancer and they married in 1960. She appeared to be one of his dance students in Pittsburgh and also worked as his assistant choreographer (Overview of Gene Kelly).
He believed that many people though of dance as a feminine form of art, which he later proved wrong in 1958. As a matter of fact, he wrote and narrated a dance in the NBC-TV special called Dancing Is a Man’s Game. In this routine, he used athletes to demonstrate the physicality and manliness of dance, which Americans viewed as an effective art. After this aired most of the public were taught to appreciate the art of dance (Krebs).
From experience, he tackled virtually any aspect of motion picture performance or production through his career. He also dazzled his audience worldwide by creating technical innovations that made his performances stand out and seem more astounding to viewers (Overview of Gene Kelly). Finally, when the movie musical began to fade around 1960, he turned to television and easily starred in two short-lived programs, which included Going My Way and The Funny Side. Eventually in 1967 his television career started to improve after he directed, produced and starred in Jack and the Beanstalk. To promote his other film musicals from his past he helped host the documentary That’s Entertainment! in the mid-1970s (Gene Kelly Biography).
During the late 1970s and 1980s he retreated from acting almost completely. His last appearance in any film was during 1980 in the musical Xanadu. Although he was slowly disappearing from the acting career, he still had a few supporting roles and guest spots on different shows including, The Muppet Show and The Love Boat, but often appeared on tribute specials (Gene Kelly Biography).
Overall, he had many popular works and was a well-known actor and producer in his time. His second marriage failed in 1973 when his wife passed away due to leukemia. Finally, in 1990 he married his last wife Patricia Ward Kelly, who was a journalist. They married when she was only thirty-two, he was seventy-eight, and they met through her interviewing him, which was stated that she survived him (Overview of Gene Kelly).
1994 was a big year for Kelly considering he was a recipient of the National Medal of Awards, while President Clinton awarded him this at the ceremony in the White House (Krebs). Between 1994 and 1995 he suffered from multiple strokes, which were not fully treated over the years. Unfortunately, in 1996 he died in his home due to the untreated strokes on February 2 at the age of eighty-three. Debbie Reynolds, a co-star on Singin’ In the Rain stated, “there’ll never be another Gene, I was only eighteen when we made that movie, and the hardest thing was keeping up with his energy” (Gene Kelly Biography).