Fanny Kelly's divine plain face.

 

Fanny Kelly's divine plain face.
--
Letter to Mrs. Wordsworth (February 18, 1818)

 

Charles Lamb

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The major difference between Astaire and Kelly is a difference, not of talent or technique, but of levels of sophistication. On the face of it, Kelly looks the more sophisticated. Where Kelly has ideas, Astaire has dance steps. Where Kelly has smartly tailored, dramatically apt Comden and Green scripts, Astaire in the Thirties made do with formulas derived from nineteenth-century French Farce. But the Kelly film is no longer a dance film. It's a story film with dances, as distinguished from a dance film with a story. When Fred and Ginger go into their dance, you see it as a distinct formal entity, even if it's been elaborately built up to in the script. In a Kelly film, the plot action and the musical set pieces preserve a smooth community of high spirits, so that the pressure in a dance number will often seem too low, the dance itself plebeian or folksy in order to "match up" with the rest of the picture.

 

Fred Astaire

 

As one of the handful of girls who worked with both of those dance geniuses, I think I can give an honest comparison. In my opinion, Kelly is the more inventive choreographer of the two. Astaire, with Hermes Pan's help, creates fabulous numbers - for himself and his partner. But Kelly can create an entire number for somebody else... I think, however, that Astaire's coordination is better than Kelly's... his sense of rhythm is uncanny. Kelly, on the other hand, is the stronger of the two. When he lifts you, he lifts you!... To sum it up, I'd say they were the two greatest dancing personalities who were ever on screen. But it's like comparing apples and oranges. They're both delicious.

 

Fred Astaire

 

Me? I play Gene Kelly...It's a guy who produces, directs, sings, and dances. who else could it be but Kelly?

 

Fred Astaire

 

I suspect it is this Camelot view that leads Miss Croce to be rather unfair to Gene Kelly...I should say the difference starts with their bodies. If you compare Kelly to Astaire, accepting Astaire's debonair style as perfection then, of course, Kelly looks bad. But in popular dance forms, in which movement is not rigidly codified, as it is in ballet, perfection is a romantic myth or a figure of speech, nothing more. Kelly isn't a winged dancer; he's a hoofer and more earthbound. But he has warmth and range as an actor...Astaire's grasshopper lightness was his limitation as an actor - confining him to perennial gosh-oh-gee adolescence;; he was always and only a light comedian and could function only in fairytale vehicles.

 

Fred Astaire

 

You're dying to spend a night with me in the Palace of Wisdom. (to Kelly Kelly)

 

John Hennigan