Fred Astaire

If I was black and blue, it was Gene. If I didn't have a scratch it was Fred.

I don't make love by kissing, I make love by dancing.

Come on, Fred, I'm not your sister, you know.

Fred taught me a step because I said I can't let this experience be over without my learning something. He taught me the most wonderful Fred Astaire-like step, with an umbrella. It was a complete throwaway; it was almost invisible. It was in the way he walked. As he moved along, he bounced the umbrella on the floor to the beat and then he grabbed it. It was effortless and invisible. As a matter of fact, a few years later I was photographing Gene Kelly and told him that Fred Astaire had taught me this trick with an umbrella. And Kelly said, "Oh I'll teach you one," and he did, and the two tricks with the umbrella in some way define the difference between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and, in my view, demonstrate who is the greater of the two artists. With Gene Kelly, he threw the umbrella way up into the air, and then he moved to catch it, very slowly, grabbing it behind his back. It was a big, grandstand play, about nothing.

Just to see him walk down the street ... to me is worth the price of admission.

He's a genius...a classical dancer like I never saw in my life.

The main point of Flying Down to Rio is the screen promise of Fred Astaire.... He's assuredly a bet after this one, for he's distinctly likeable on the screen, the mike is kind to his voice and as a dancer he remains in a class by himself. The latter observation will be no news to the professsion, which has long admitted that Astaire starts dancing where the others stop hoofing.

A very distinguished colleague began his criticism of this show by asking what is Mr Astaire's secret. May I suggest that the solution hangs on a little word of three letters? Mr Astaire's secret is that of the late Rudolph Valentino and of Mr Maurice Chevalier — sex, but sex so bejewelled and be-pixied that the weaker vessels who fall for it can pretend that it isn't sex at all but a sublimated projection of the Little Fellow with the Knuckles in His Eyes. You'd have thought by the look of the first night foyer that it was Mothering Thursday, since every woman in the place was urgent to take to her bosom this waif with the sad eyes and the twinkling feet.

He lacks confidence to the most enormous degree of all the people in the world. He will not even go to see his rushes. He'll stay out in the alley and pace up and down and worry and collar you when you come out and say 'How good was so and so?'.... It would be much simpler if he would go and look at them himself, you know. But he always thinks he is no good.

He has a remarkable ear for intonation, a great sense of rhythm and what is most important, he has great style - style in my way of thinking is a matter of delivery, phrasing, pace, emphasis, and most of all presence.

I have no desire to prove anything by it. I have never used it as an outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance.

Q: What great singers of the past do you wish had sung your music?

But I do nothing that I don't like, such as "inventing" up to the arty or "down" to the corny. I happen to relish a certain type of corn. What I think is the really dangerous approach is the "let's be artistic" attitude. I know that artistry just happens.

The fact that Fred and I were in no way similar - nor were we the best male dancers around never occurred to the public or the journalists who wrote about us...Fred and I got the cream of the publicity and naturally we were compared. And while I personally was proud of the comparison, because there was no-one to touch Fred when it came to "popular" dance, we felt that people, especially film critics at the time, should have made an attempt to differentiate between our two styles. Fred and I both got a bit edgy after our names were mentioned in the same breath. I was the Marlon Brando of dancers, and he the Cary Grant. My approach was completely different from his, and we wanted the world to realise this, and not lump us together like peas in a pod. If there was any resentment on our behalf, it certainly wasn't with each other, but with people who talked about two highly individual dancers as if they were one person. For a start, the sort of wardrobe I wore - blue jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers - Fred wouldn't have been caught dead in. Fred always looked immaculate in rehearsals, I was always in an old shirt. Fred's steps were small, neat, graceful and intimate - mine were ballet-oriented and very athletic. The two of us couldn't have been more different, yet the public insisted on thinking of us as rivals...I persuaded him to put on his dancing shoes again, and replace me in Easter Parade after I'd broken my ankle. If we'd been rivals, I certainly wouldn't have encouraged him to make a comeback.

I guess the only jewels of my life were the pictures I made with Fred Astaire.

By far the gentlest man I have ever known.

Except for times Fred worked with real professional dancers like Cyd Charisse, it was a twenty five year war.

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

He is a truly complex fellow, not unlike the Michelangelos and da Vincis of the Renaissance period. He's a supreme artist but he is constantly filled with doubts and self-anger about his work--and that is what makes him so good. He is a perfectionist who is never sure he is attaining perfection.

When I was in the Soviet Union recently I was being interviewed by a newspaperman and he said, "Which dancers influenced you the most?" and I said, "Oh, well, Fred Astaire." He looked very surprised and shocked and I said, "What's the matter?" He said, "Well, Mr. Balanchine just said the same thing."