Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 26, 1995 TAG: 9504260121
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The blond, blue-eyed actress, who came out of Charleston contests and the vaudeville circuits to win notice as a cherub-faced flapper with a piping voice and a sassy air in early musicals such as ``42nd Street'' and ``Gold Diggers of 1933,'' went on to win acclaim for her dramatic portrayals and an Academy Award for best actress for her depiction of a lovelorn career woman in the 1940 film ``Kitty Foyle.''
The potent chemistry of her partnership with Astaire, in a succession of urbane romances that featured rapturous dance routines, propelled her into the top 10 of Hollywood's box-office attractions.
``He gives her class, and she gives him sex,'' Katharine Hepburn once said. By 1941, Ginger Rogers was the highest-paid American woman, earning $355,000 a year.
While her graceful dancing was on display in her many musicals, Rogers also won renown in dramatic roles including an aspiring actress in ``Stage Door'' (1937) and a prostitute's daughter in ``Primrose Path'' (1940). Her gift for comedy bubbled through movies like ``Bachelor Mother'' (1939), ``Tom, Dick and Harry'' (1941) and ``The Major and the Minor'' (1942). In a screen career that began with a bit role in ``Young Man of Manhattan'' in 1930, she made more than 70 movies.
But the Astaire-Rogers musicals, epitomizing grace, energy and sophistication, were her enduring memorial. The couple, in their smooth, seemingly effortless style, spun gossamer fantasies from the infectious scores of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Vincent Youmans.
Anna Kisselgoff, chief dance critic of The New York Times, said Tuesday: ``Ginger Rogers was a better dancer than most people gave her credit for. She may have swooped and dipped into many a romantic swoon, but her footwork was as precise as Astaire's.''
The plots of their films often turned on mistaken identity and other far-fetched devices, but they were accepted as breathing spaces between the couple's champagne dance numbers in lavish settings where all the walls, telephones and pianos were white, the butlers were always comic and love was the only concern.
Under Astaire's painstaking coaching, Rogers' dancing became more fluid with each film, and the consensus was that none of his later partnerships generated the electricity they did.
Writing in 1972, the dance critic Arlene Croce said Rogers ``danced with love, with pride in the beauty of an illusion - and with one of the most elegant dancer's bodies imaginable.'' She added, ``She avoided any suggestion of toil or inadequacy.''
When the actress went to the stage to accept her Oscar on Feb. 27, 1941, she stood with tears streaming down her face and said: ``This is the greatest moment of my life. I want to thank the one who has stood by me faithfully: my mother.''
by CNB