I saw my first musical" Singin' in the rain" on french T.V.
Cyd Charisse was the first dancer who ever caught my eyes.
My mother told me that she was known as "the legs"
- the most beautiful legs of all Hollywood.
When i made my first Art video "Show People", i decided to work on musicals.
I try to create a story with movies scenes that were belonging to differents musicals.
My video is 30 min long. In this 2nd part,
i use the famous Broadway Melody ballet with Cyd Charisse
in her wonderful green sparkling dress.
I hope you will enjoy this tribute to HollywoodMusicals.
If you want to see the video click on the fallowing links.
I know sometimes you can't all see videos on blogger.
SHOW PEOPLE links:
Cyd Charisse was born Tula Ellice Finklea on March 8, 1922, in Amarillo, Texas. Hollywood's greatest dancer of all times first studied classical dancing. She was in the Russian Ballet in Monte-Carlo and worked with David Lichine and Leonid Massine, using the names Felia Sidorova and Maria Istomina. She married her ex-dance teacher, Nico Charisse, in 1939.
In 1943, David Lichine asked her to appear in her first movie ballet, in "Something to shout about", in which she is credited as Lily Norwood. The same year, she played a Bolchoï dancer in "Mission to Moscow", by Michael Curtiz. Choreographer Robert Alton and producer Arthur Freed hired her, to dance with Fred Astaire in "Ziegfeld Follies", directed by Vincente Minnelli, and Cyd Charisse then signed a seven year deal with the MGM.
In the next few years, she appeared regularly in dancing acts of several musicals, with Judy Garland, Esther Williams, and Kathryn Grayson. It is also the time when she married her second husband, singer Tony Martin (1948).
She really became famous in 1952, with her fantastic appearance in the Broadway Melody Ballet scene, with Gene Kelly, in the most famous musical ever : "Singin' in the rain", by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. In Vincente Minnelli "The Band Wagon", where she starred with Fred Astaire was a real consecration. "Singin' in the rain" and "The band wagon" are Cyd Charisse's most important movies, and acts like the Broadway Melody Ballet, and, in the second movie, Dancing in the dark and The Girl Hunt Ballet,
are forever in the Hollywood Musicals Hall of Fame.
Cyd Charisse died on June 17, 2008 in Los Angeles, California.
