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BIOGRAPHY
Broadway
debut
Ginger's first Broadway musical, Top
Speed, featured her in the
ingénue role. The show opened Christmas Day 1929 and
ran for less than 20 weeks, but Ginger was hailed as
a promising up-and-comer. Walter Winchell said she was
"… as poised as a veteran," and Brooks Atkinson of the
New York Times noted, "… an impudent young thing, Ginger
Rogers carried youth and humor to the point where they
are completely charming."
While Ginger was performing eight shows a week in Top
Speed, she was also making
films for Paramount at their studio in Astoria, Long
Island. Her first film, Young
Man of Manhattan, starred
Claudette Colbert and featured Ginger as a 16-year-old
flapper. Her line "Cigarette me, big boy," became a
classic phrase in the American vocabulary.
Ginger's first starring role on Broadway was in George
and Ira Gershwin's Girl
Crazy. Her two hit songs from
that show, Embraceable You
and But Not For Me,
have since become musical standards.
Charming Hollywood
After Girl Crazy
closed, Ginger moved on to Hollywood. Nineteen films
into her career she joined Fred Astaire at RKO Radio
Studios in Flying Down to
Rio. The new team took the
world by storm, subsequently making eight more pictures
together at RKO: Gay Divorcee,
Roberta, Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Swing Time, Shall
We Dance, Carefree and The
Story of Vernon and Irene Castle.
Ten years later they made their 10th film together for
MGM, The Barkleys of Broadway.
Garson Kanin wrote of them, "The magic of Astaire and
Rogers cannot be explained; it can only be felt. They
created a style, a mood, a happening. They flirted,
chased, courted, slid, caressed, hopped, skipped, jumped,
bent, swayed, clasped, wafted, undulated, nestled, leapt,
quivered, glided, spun - in sum, made love before our
eyes. We have not seen their like since."
In addition to her films with Astaire, Ginger also starred
in a variety of comedies and dramas in the 1940s and
1950s. They included Vivacious
Lady, The Major and the Minor, Lady in the Dark, Weekend
at the Waldorf, Storm Warning
and Monkey Business.
Her leading men included Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, David
Niven, Burgess Meredith,, William Powell, Ronald Colman,
Dennis Morgan and James Stewart. She was honored in
1940 with a Best Actress Academy Award for her performance
in Kitty Foyle,
and in 1945 she was recorded as the highest paid female
performer in Hollywood.
That same year, Ginger bought a 1000-acre ranch on the
Rogue River in Southern Oregon. She built a modern dairy
complex and bred Guernsey milk stock for seven years.
Some of the milk went to Camp White, where almost 25,000
soldiers came and went during World War II. Even today,
in the Rogue River Valley, there still are strains of
purebred Guernsey cattle with Ginger's name on their
breeding records.
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