Fred Astaire, the dancer whose will asked that no one ever play him

Fred Astaire

Photo: Studio publicity still / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 10, 1899 Omaha, Nebraska, USA
Died	June 22, 1987 (88)
Occupation	Dancer, actor and singer
Known for	The Towering Inferno, Funny Face, Top Hat
Awards	Academy (lifetime achievement) · 2 Golden Globe · BAFTA · 2 Emmy · Kennedy Center Honors · AFI Life Achievement (lifetime achievement)

Fred Astaire spent his working life making sure nobody else decided how his dancing would look. He made directors hold him head to toe, in as few shots as possible, so a routine reached the audience whole. “Either the camera will dance, or I will,” he said. He treated his own story the same way. Offers to film his life arrived constantly and he refused them all, then put the refusal in his will, explaining that he had no wish to have his life misinterpreted, “which it would be.” Sony is now preparing that film anyway, and Tom Holland is already in the rehearsal studio.

The control came from somewhere. Frederick Austerlitz grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Fritz Austerlitz, an Austrian-born brewery worker from Linz, and Johanna Geilus, who saw her children’s talent as the family’s way out. When Fritz lost his job, the Austerlitzes moved to New York, and the surname was swapped for Astaire. The first act, billed as Juvenile Artists Presenting an Electric Musical Toe-Dancing Novelty, put the boy in top hat and tails for the first half and a lobster costume for the second.

His older sister Adele was the natural, the one audiences came to see. Fred, born on May 10, 1899, was the planner. By 14 he was running the act’s music, and in 1916 he met a young song plugger named George Gershwin. The siblings reached Broadway in 1917 and later London’s West End, and the Gershwins wrote Lady, Be Good for them in 1924. The partnership ended in 1932, when Adele married Lord Charles Cavendish, son of the Duke of Devonshire. Fred went on alone in Cole Porter’s Gay Divorce, where he introduced “Night and Day” with Claire Luce, who had to remind him to play it as romance: “Come on, Fred, I’m not your sister, you know.”

Hollywood was not convinced at first. The RKO screen test is lost, and the famous verdict attached to it has been retold so often that Astaire himself felt obliged to correct it: “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Also dances.” He made his debut on loan to MGM, dancing with Joan Crawford in Dancing Lady, then took fifth billing in Flying Down to Rio, one line below Ginger Rogers.

He did not want another partner. “I’ve just managed to live down one partnership,” he wrote to his agent, calling the team idea “out.” Audiences overruled him. Astaire and Rogers made nine pictures at RKO in six years, among them The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Swing Time and Shall We Dance, and reunited a decade later for The Barkleys of Broadway. With his collaborator Hermes Pan he rehearsed each number for weeks before a single take. In Swing Time he sang Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields’s “The Way You Look Tonight” at a piano to a woman with shampoo in her hair, and the song won the Oscar.

The same film holds the number that complicates the legend. “Bojangles of Harlem” was conceived as a tribute to Bill Robinson and danced in the style of his one-time teacher John W. Bubbles, with Astaire trading steps with three giant shadows of himself, a trick Pan invented. It is also the only routine of his career performed in blackface. The most inventive special effect he ever filmed and the makeup that makes it hard to watch today share the same four minutes, and any film about his life has to decide what to do with them. He also grew restless inside the Rogers pictures and walked away to make A Damsel in Distress with a non-dancing Joan Fontaine, which failed.

In the 1940s he freelanced, partnering Rita Hayworth at Columbia and Bing Crosby in Holiday Inn. Convinced his career was slipping, he announced his retirement during Blue Skies, made “Puttin’ On the Ritz” his farewell, and in 1947 founded the Fred Astaire Dance Studios. The farewell lasted two years. Gene Kelly was injured, and Astaire replaced him opposite Judy Garland in Easter Parade. At MGM he danced up the walls and across the ceiling in Royal Wedding and made The Band Wagon for Vincente Minnelli. By the time Funny Face with Audrey Hepburn and Silk Stockings with Cyd Charisse both lost money, the studio musical was dying around him.

Television gave him a second act. An Evening with Fred Astaire won nine Emmys, including his own for best single performance by an actor. Critics complained that dancing was not acting, and he offered to give the statuette back. He then spent two decades proving the point in roles without a step: the weary scientist of On the Beach, an Irish rogue for Francis Ford Coppola in Finian’s Rainbow, where the director finally overruled his camera rule, and the con man of The Towering Inferno, which brought his only competitive Oscar nomination, as well as a Golden Globe and a BAFTA. A second Emmy came with Helen Hayes in A Family Upside Down in 1978, after an honorary Oscar in 1950; the AFI Life Achievement Award followed in 1981. At 78 he broke his wrist skateboarding in his driveway.

Off screen he was intensely private. He married the socialite Phyllis Potter in 1933, over the objections of his mother and Adele, and raised Fred Jr., Ava and his stepson Peter with her. Her death from lung cancer in 1954 left him ready to abandon Daddy Long Legs and pay the production costs himself. In 1980, at 81, he married Robyn Smith, a jockey 45 years younger. He died of pneumonia in Los Angeles on June 22, 1987, aged 88.

Holland first said in December 2021 that he would play Astaire. Director Paul King is making the film from a script he wrote with Steven Levenson, based on Kathleen Riley’s book The Astaires: Fred & Adele. The estate never kept the film rights to his 1959 memoir Steps in Time, and they ended up at Sony. In November 2025 Smith wrote to producer Amy Pascal that her husband “was explicit in his Will that he did not want his life story to be depicted on screen” and that she “fully respects and upholds those wishes.” His daughter, Ava Astaire McKenzie, supports the film, and her son Tyler McKenzie is a consultant and co-producer. On September 25, 2026, Margaret Qualley was cast as Adele and Sabrina Carpenter as Ginger Rogers, with filming expected to start in January. Holland has said he wants no doubles and every dance shot in one take, “how he would have done it.”

King has pointed out that no footage of Adele dancing survives, so half of this story will have to be imagined. The other half already exists exactly the way Astaire wanted it: full-length, uncut, on film. Whatever Holland manages in one take, the originals will still be there to measure it against.

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Tags: actors, musicals, Tom Holland, Sabrina Carpenter, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers

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