it's always fair weather - The Screengrab

Betsy Blair, 1923 - 2009

The actress Betsy Blair, who died last week, at 85, in London, where she had lived for many years, is best remembered for her performance in the female lead in Marty (1955), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In fact, her Hollywood career had started cracking apart before she even got that role. A dancer and model when she was in her teens, Blair met Gene Kelly when he was working as a choreographer of the Billy Rose show Diamond Horseshoe and hired her for the chorus. In 1941, when she was 17, they married. That same year, she made her "straight" acting debut as the female lead in William Saroyan's The Beautiful People. She broke into movies in 1947 and had parts in such films as A Double Life and Another Part of the Forest. Unfortunately, the HUAC era of the blacklist was starting up, and Blair, who had been in a Marxist study group run by the actor Lloyd Gough, was politically vulnerable. (She later said that she had tried to join the Communist party but had been refused admission because her marriage to a relatively apolitical movie star would make her membership problematic.) The studio almost got cold feet about hiring her for Marty, but Kelly himself settled that one by telling the bosses that if she didn't get the job, he feared that he'd be too distraught to show up for work on his own big production, It's Always Fair Weather.

Cyd Charisse, 1922--2008

Cyd Charisse, nee' Tula Ellice Finklea, has died at 86. With legs on hinges and a face abd figure that, to steal a line from dance critic Raymond Chandler, were enough to make a bishop kick a rock through a stained glass window, Charisse was one of the most spectacular ornaments of Hollywood movie musicals in the 1940s and 1950s. Not the least of her achievements is that she was the performer who most conspicuously played a big role in the careers of both the twin titans of dancing movie stars, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.

MIchael Kidd

Choreographer-director Michael Kidd, a major force in Hollywood and Broadway musicals, has died; his family says that he was 92, though Kidd himself had claimed to be 88, probably so that he could hang onto his student discount. A sometime actor who used dance as an expression of character and to serve a narrative function, Kidd won five Tonys for his stage work, which included Finian's Rainbow and Guys and Dolls, and was awarded a special Academy Award in 1997.