Download or read book Steps in Time written by Fred Astaire and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the foremost entertainers of the twentieth century—singer, actor, choreographer, and, of course, the most dazzling "hoofer" in the history of motion pictures—Fred Astaire was the epitome of charm, grace, and suave sophistication, with a style all his own and a complete disregard for the laws of gravity. Steps in Time is Astaire's story in his own words, a memoir as beguiling, exuberant, and enthralling as the great artist himself, the man ballet legends George Balanchine and Rudolf Nureyev cited as, hands down, the century's greatest dancer. From his debut in vaudeville at age six through his remarkable career as the star of many of the most popular Hollywood musicals ever captured on celluloid, Steps in Time celebrates the golden age of entertainment and its royalty, as seen through the eyes of the era's affable and adored prince. Illustrated with more than forty rare photographs from the author's personal collection, here is Astaire in all his debonair glory—his life, his times, his movies, and, above all, his magical screen appearances and enduring friendship with the most beloved of all his dancing partners, Ginger Rogers.
Download or read book A Dance with Fred Astaire written by Jonas Mekas and published by . This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Dance with Fred Astaire covers the 94 years Mekas has spent weaving himself inextricably into the fabric of postwar culture, featuring a dizzying cast of cultural icons both underground and mainstream.
Download or read book Fred Astaire written by Sarah Giles and published by Doubleday Books. This book was released on 1988 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hollywood actor and dancer comes to life in the words of the people who knew him best, his family, friends, and peers.
Download or read book The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book written by Arlene Croce and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Footwork written by Roxane Orgill and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capturing the grace and beauty of the two biggest names in dance history, this fascinating glimpse into the lives of siblings Fred and Adele Astaire traces their extraordinary journey to success on Broadway and in Hollywood.
Download or read book Fred Astaire written by Joseph Epstein and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-29 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Epstein’s Fred Astaire investigates the great dancer’s magical talent, taking up the story of his life, his personality, his work habits, his modest pretensions, and above all his accomplishments. Written with the wit and grace the subject deserves, Fred Astaire provides a remarkable portrait of this extraordinary artist and how he came to embody for Americans a fantasy of easy elegance and, paradoxically, of democratic aristocracy.Tracing Astaire’s life from his birth in Omaha to his death in his late eighties in Hollywood, the book discusses his early days with his talented and outspoken sister Adele, his gifts as a singer (Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Jerome Kern all delighted in composing for Astaire), and his many movie dance partners, among them Cyd Charisse, Rita Hayworth, Eleanor Powell, and Betty Hutton. A key chapter of the book is devoted to Astaire’s somewhat unwilling partnership with Ginger Rogers, the woman with whom he danced most dazzlingly. What emerges from these pages is a fascinating view of an American era, seen through the accomplishments of Fred Astaire, an unassuming but uncompromising performer who transformed entertainment into art and gave America a new yet enduring standard for style.
Download or read book Music Makes Me written by Todd Decker and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-06-24 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fred Astaire: one of the great jazz artists of the twentieth century? Astaire is best known for his brilliant dancing in the movie musicals of the 1930s, but in Music Makes Me, Todd Decker argues that Astaire’s work as a dancer and choreographer —particularly in the realm of tap dancing—made a significant contribution to the art of jazz. Decker examines the full range of Astaire’s work in filmed and recorded media, from a 1926 recording with George Gershwin to his 1970 blues stylings on television, and analyzes Astaire’s creative relationships with the greats, including George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and Johnny Mercer. He also highlights Astaire’s collaborations with African American musicians and his work with lesser known professionals—arrangers, musicians, dance directors, and performers.
Download or read book The Astaires written by Kathleen Riley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book about the theatre career of Fred and Adele Astaire, detailing their years in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in London, their impact culturally, and the essence of their partnership on and off the stage.
Download or read book Following Fred Astaire written by Nathalie Anderson and published by Word Works Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 1998 Washington Prize. The meticulous attention to detail and originality of her tone should be sufficient to herald Anderson's debut volume as a triumph. But there is an underlying sense of irony touched with wry wit that informs Anderson's disarming poems which are at once both funny and heartbreaking. Anderson's keen eye illuminates our socially-constructed ideas of gender and identity, the various mannerisms and dance steps we consider appropriate for women and men. --Marcus Cafagna. Following Fred Astaire pulls off what much contemporary poetry won't attempt. Difficult--yes, difficult--brainy, playful language. A sensibility that resists what is predictable. Beautifully musical lines. This is ambitious, original, and lovely work. --Lisa Coffman. Here are the infinitesimal private heroisms daily required of the unpartnered, the disappointments of romance, the eternal return of hope, in poems solaced by friendship and dreams, and by the illimitable grace of language. --Marilyn Nelson.
Download or read book Puttin On the Ritz written by Peter Levinson and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fred Astaire defined elegance on the dance floor. With white tie, tails and a succession of elegant partners - Ginger Rogers, Cyd Charisse, Rita Hayworth, Eleanor Powell, Judy Garland and others - he created an indelible image of the Anglo bon vivant. His origins, though, were far more humble: Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Fred Astaire came from Midwestern stock that partially had its origin in the late nineteenth century Jewish communities of Austria. At first, he played second fiddle in vaudeville to his sister, Adele; however, once he learned how to tap and bought his first Brooks Brothers suit, the game changed. How did he transform himself from a small town Nebraska boy into the most sophisticated man ever to dance across a dance floor? In this comprehensive new book about the life and artistry of Fred Astaire, Peter Levinson looks carefully at the entirety of Astaire's career from vaudeville to Broadway to Hollywood to television. He explores Astaire's relationships with his vivacious dance partners, his friendship with songwriters like George Gershwin and Irving Berlin and his relationship with choreographers like Hermes Pan to discover how Astaire, in effect, created his elegant persona. Astaire put his mark on the Hollywood musical, starting his career at RKO and then moving to MGM. From his long list of films, certain classics like "Swing Time", "Top Hat", "Royal Wedding" and "The Bandwagon" revolutionized the presentation of dance on film; but, he also revolutionized the television variety special with the Emmy-Award-Winning "An Evening With Fred Astaire". For 'Puttin' on the Ritz", veteran Hollywood insider, Peter Levinson interviewed over two hundred people who worked closely with Astaire such as Debbie Reynolds, Dick Van Dyke, Artie Shaw, Bobby Short, Oscar Peterson, Mel Ferrer, Betty Garrett, Joel Grey, Arlene Dahl, Michael Kidd, Betty Comden, Onna White, Margaret Whiting, Andy Williams, and others like Quincy Jones, John Travolta, and John Williams, to provide an intimate window on to his professional as well as his personal life. His new biography of Astaire is a celebration of the great era of sophistication on Broadway and in Hollywood as seen through the life of a man who learned how to put on the Ritz and become America's premiere song-and-dance-man: Fred Astaire.
Download or read book Starring Fred Astaire written by Stanley Green and published by New York : Dodd, Mead. This book was released on 1973 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hermes Pan written by John Franceschina and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Armed with an eighth-grade education, an inexhaustible imagination, and an innate talent for dancing, Hermes Pan (1909-1990) was a boy from Tennessee who became the most prolific, popular, and memorable choreographer of the glory days of the Hollywood musical. While he may be most well-known for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals which he choreographed at RKO film studios, he also created dances at Twentieth Century-Fox, M-G-M, Paramount, and later for television, winning both the Oscar and the Emmy for best choreography.In Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced with Fred Astaire, Pan emerges as a man in full, an artist inseparable from his works. He was a choreographer deeply interested in his dancers' personalities, and his dances became his way of embracing and understanding the outside world. Though his time in a Trappist monastery proved to him that he was more suited to choreography than to life as a monk, Pan remained a deeply devout Roman Catholic throughout his creative life, a person firmly convinced of the powers of prayer. While he was rarely to be seen without several beautiful women at his side, it was no secret that Pan was homosexual and even had a life partner. As Pan worked at the nexus of the cinema industry's creative circles during the golden age of the film musical, this book traces not only Pan's personal life but also the history of the Hollywood musical itself. It is a study of Pan, who emerges here as a benevolent perfectionist, and equally of the stars, composers, and directors with whom he worked, from Astaire and Rogers to Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Bob Fosse, George Gershwin, Samuel Goldwyn, and countless other luminaries of American popular entertainment.Author John Franceschina bases his telling of Pan's life on extensive first-hand research into Pan's unpublished correspondence and his own interviews. Pan enjoyed one of the most illustrious careers of any Hollywood dance director, and because his work also spanned across Broadway and television, this book will appeal to readers interested in musical theater history, dance history, and film.
Download or read book Astaire Dancing written by John E. Mueller and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Vaudeville old new written by Frank Cullen and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 1362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fred Astaire written by Joseph Epstein and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written with the wit and grace the subject deserves, "Fred Astaire" provides a remarkable portrait of this extraordinary artist, chronicling how he came to embody for Americans a fantasy of easy elegance and, in a more complicated manner, of democratic aristocracy.
Download or read book Ginger written by Ginger Rogers and published by It Books. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She was born Virginia Katherine McMath, but the world would come to know her—and love her—as Ginger Rogers: Broadway star, Academy Award-winning actress, and the ultimate on-screen dancing partner of the inimitable Fred Astaire. In Ginger: My Story, the legendary entertainer shares the triumphs of a remarkable career that began when she won a Texas dancing contest at age fourteen; the joys and heartbreaks of her five marriages; her relationships with some of Hollywood's major leading men, including Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and damaged daredevil billionaire Howard Hughes; and the strength of her religious convictions that got her through thick and thin. Lavishly illustrated with rare photographs from the author's personal collection, Ginger is an enthralling, behind-the-scenes tour of Hollywood life during the Golden Age of movies by one of its most enduring stars.
Download or read book Fred Astaire Dance Book written by L. K. Engel and published by . This book was released on 1986-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
