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| Cyd Charisse has passed away - |
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olympic
 Posted:
Tue Jun 17, 2008 6:45 pm |
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Cyd Charisse has passed away
The legendary screen siren died Tuesday after an apparent heart attack.
She was 86.
Cyd lived a long, full life. She starred in countless musicals with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.
Her dancing feet live on!
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Joined: 18 Dec 2006
Posts: 2123
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| SavannahStar
Posted:
Tue Jun 17, 2008 6:47 pm |
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RIP!
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**SuperStar**
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 21291
Location: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
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| gwen
Posted:
Tue Jun 17, 2008 6:51 pm |
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She sure had beautiful legs and could really dance!
RIP!
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AKA Gagal_05
Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 15241
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| danascully
Posted:
Tue Jun 17, 2008 6:54 pm |
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| gwen wrote: | She sure had beautiful legs and could really dance!
RIP! |
Gwen, my Mother was watching an old movie the other day on TCM, and she was in it. She sure could cut a rug. 
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Smoke Stack
Joined: 31 Mar 2006
Posts: 3092
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| Schmerty
Posted:
Tue Jun 17, 2008 6:56 pm |
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Thank you for the wonderful musicals in which you starred . Thank goodness for films in which you will live on for other generations!
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Skipping along my own path.
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 3335
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| CherokeeKid
Posted:
Tue Jun 17, 2008 7:29 pm |
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Obituary: Cyd Charisse
Cyd Charisse danced with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in some of Hollywood's finest musicals - The Band Wagon and Silk Stockings with Astaire, and Singin' in the Rain and Brigadoon with Gene Kelly.
She was one of the most brilliant and beautiful female dancers ever to appear on the big screen.
With the decline of big musicals she took straight roles, but not with the same success.
Cyd Charisse was born Tula Finklea in Amarillo, Texas, in 1921, she was six when she began dance lessons to strengthen her muscles after a bout of polio.
She went on to study ballet and, at the age of 18, married Nico Charisse, her instructor.
She became known as Sid when she was a child - the nearest her brother could get in his attempt to say Sis. Later, when she signed for MGM, she changed the spelling to Cyd.
Erotically charged
Cyd Charisse made several films in the early 1940s, using the name Lily Norwood, but became a star of film musicals as Cyd Charisse after joining MGM, who were reputed to have insured her undeniably lovely legs for a million dollars each.
But Cyd Charisse later revealed that that had been an invention of the MGM publicity machine.
She was married to her second husband, the singer Tony Martin, and a new mother, when she starred with Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain.
She worked with the sometimes rough and always demanding Kelly again in Brigadoon and partnered Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon and her favourite film, Silk Stockings.
Like Kelly, Astaire was a perfectionist, but Cyd Charisse's time with Diaghilev's ballet company had equipped her for the challenge:
"Coming from a Russian ballet company and a lot of hard training," she said later.
"I was a strong dancer and I loved to dance and I loved to work and he found someone who liked to work just as much as he did and we got along fabulously well together."
She also appeared in The Unfinished Dance, Words and Music, It's Always Fair Weather and Invitation to the Dance.
Later she was in Two Weeks in Another Town, and made some films in Europe, including Warlords of Atlantis.
Cyd Charisse did play some straight roles, but her dancing was more eloquent than any spoken word.
While the censors were always on the set, training their eagle eyes on her costumes, the erotic nature of her dance escaped them.
And though the golden age of Hollywood musicals came to an end, admirers still remember Cyd Charisse's vital role.
Cyd Charisse danced with Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain
Cyd Charisse studied ballet
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3516902.stm
R.I.P. Cyd Charisse!
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Joined: 11 May 2006
Posts: 6348
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| chance
Posted:
Tue Jun 17, 2008 7:40 pm |
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R.I.P. Cyd Charisse. You were a great talent. I love the old movies.
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Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 2785
Location: Deep in the heart of Texas
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| CherokeeKid
Posted:
Tue Jun 17, 2008 7:42 pm |
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Cyd Charisse, 86, Dancer Had $5 Million Legs
By STEPHEN MILLER, Staff Reporter of the Sun
June 18, 2008
A lanky Texas beauty whose legs were once insured for $5 million, Cyd Charisse danced her way into cinematic immortality in such films as "Singin' In the Rain," "Brigadoon," and "Silk Stockings."
Charisse, who died yesterday in Los Angeles at 86, was MGM's leading female dancer of the 1950s. She had her pick of partners, from Gene Kelly to Fred Astaire, who said, "When you've danced with her, you stay danced with."
Her height was 5 feet, 6 inches, but in high heels and full-length stockings, she seemed serenely tall, and she moved with extraordinary grace. Her flawless beauty and jet-black hair contributed to an aura of perfection that Astaire described in his 1959 memoir, "Steps in Time," as "beautiful dynamite."
Born Tula Ellice Finklea on March 8, 1922, according to the Associated Press, in Amarillo, Texas, Charisse suffered as a youngster with polio, which left her with weakened legs. Convinced she needed exercise, her father, a jeweler, installed a barre in her bedroom and enrolled her at a local ballet school. She recovered completely and, at 16, became a soloist with the Ballet Russe, touring America and Europe as Felia Sidorova. When the tour was canceled with the approach of World War II, she settled in Los Angeles and studied with choreographer Nico Charisse, whom she married in 1939.
Her film career began in 1943 with bit parts in "Something to Shout About" and "Mission to Moscow," after she heard that a film studio was "looking for a girl in pointe shoes." A series of uncredited appearances followed. In 1945, she was offered a seven-year contract after being tabbed for stardom by Arthur Freed, who produced many of the finest musicals of the Technicolor era. A clever agent has been given credit for changing her name to Cyd from Sid, a nickname bestowed by a lisping baby brother.
Freed used Charisse in two films in 1946, "The Harvey Girls" and "Ziegfeld Follies." Many of Charisse's legendary performances came in collaboration with Freed, including "Singin' In the Rain" (1952) and "Brigadoon" (1954).
Often compared to Ava Gardner in the looks department, she parted early with Nico Charisse and became one of Hollywood's most eligible leading ladies. Among her suitors was the prolific Howard Hughes, who used his patented technique of taking her for a spin in his airplane.
"I was just one of the many girls he invited out a couple of times," she told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2004. "He had a long list."
If their romance was not for the ages, Hughes kept tabs on her, and when she broke a leg dancing a staircase routine in 1948, he sent limousines to chauffeur her. Later that year, she married singer Tony Martin. They had a son and were still married at her death from an apparent heart attack.
The broken leg kept her out of Freed's "Easter Parade" (1948), and Ann Miller took her place. Three years later, a pregnancy kept her from starring in Freed's "An American in Paris." Leslie Caron instead zoomed to stardom as the ingénue opposite Gene Kelly.
It was in "Singin' In the Rain" (1952) that Charisse broke through to stardom. When Freed was dissatisfied with another dancer who had been cast, Charisse inherited the role and danced with Kelly in the "Broadway Melody" at the film's climax. She stunned critics and audiences with her 25-foot Chinese silk scarf that floated in the air with the aid of a wind machine. She had not a word of dialog in the role; in most of her other appearances, her dialog was dubbed and she never sang.
Her last dancing role was in "Silk Stockings" (1957). Lavish musicals were in long-term decline. MGM dismantled Freed's musical unit.
Although she found work in a handful of dramatic films, including some in Europe, Charisse's Hollywood career stagnated thereafter. She put together a song-and-dance touring show with her husband that the two honed for decades.
She made her Broadway debut surprisingly late, in 1992, as an unhappy ballerina in the musical version of "Grand Hotel."
http://www.nysun.com/obituaries/cyd-charisse-86-dancer-had-5-million-legs/80176/
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Joined: 11 May 2006
Posts: 6348
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| CherokeeKid
Posted:
Tue Jun 17, 2008 7:48 pm |
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In this undated file photo, Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly are shown. Charisse, the long-legged Texas beauty who danced with the Ballet Russe as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, died Tuesday, June 17, 2008. She was 86.
(AP Photo)
In this undated file photo, Cyd Charisse is pictured. Charisse, the long-legged Texas beauty who danced with the Ballet Russe as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, died Tuesday, June 17, 2008. She was 86.
(AP Photo)
In this 1966 file photo, Cyd Charisse is pictured in character for her role in 'Meet Me in Las Vegas'. Charisse, the long-legged Texas beauty who danced with the Ballet Russe as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, died Tuesday, June 17, 2008. She was 86.
(AP Photo)
In this 1992 file photo, Cyd Charisse is pictured in character for her role in 'Grand Hotel, The Musical'. Charisse, the long-legged Texas beauty who danced with the Ballet Russe as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, died Tuesday, June 17, 2008. She was 86.
(AP Photo)
In this undated file photo, Fred Astaire, left, and Cyd Charisse dance in the 1953 film 'The Band Wagon'. Charisse, the long-legged Texas beauty who danced with the Ballet Russe as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, died Tuesday, June 17, 2008. She was 86.
(AP Photo)
In this undated file photo, Fred Astaire, right, and Cyd Charisse dance in the 1953 film 'The Band Wagon'. Charisse, the long-legged Texas beauty who danced with the Ballet Russe as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, died Tuesday, June 17, 2008. She was 86.
(AP Photo)
Actress Cyd Charisse is shown in her role as Ninotchka in the 1957 film 'Silk Stocking' in this undated publicity photo from Warner Bros Studios released June 17, 2008. Charisse, 86, died in Los Angeles on June 17, 2008, her spokesman Gene Schwam said.
(Warner Bros Studios/Handout/Reuters)
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Joined: 11 May 2006
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| gwen
Posted:
Tue Jun 17, 2008 8:57 pm |
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Thanks for the great pics, CK...
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AKA Gagal_05
Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 15241
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| CherokeeKid
Posted:
Tue Jun 17, 2008 9:32 pm |
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| gwen wrote: | | Thanks for the great pics, CK... |
You are most welcome, Gwen.
She was a Beauty!
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Joined: 11 May 2006
Posts: 6348
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| gwen
Posted:
Tue Jun 17, 2008 10:13 pm |
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| CherokeeKid wrote: |
You are most welcome, Gwen.
She was a Beauty! |
She certainly was.
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AKA Gagal_05
Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 15241
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