Ginger Rogers, the dance partner with the acting Oscar Fred Astaire never won

Ginger Rogers

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

Born	July 16, 1911 Independence, Missouri, United States
Died	April 25, 1995 (83)
Occupation	Actress and dancer
Known for	Top Hat, Monkey Business, Swing Time
Awards	Academy Award · Kennedy Center Honors

The night Fred Astaire finally received an Academy Award, Ginger Rogers was the one who handed it to him. His statuette was honorary, a thank-you for a body of work rather than a verdict on a performance, and the woman holding it already owned the competitive kind: Best Actress, won for Kitty Foyle, a working-girl drama a long way from the ballroom. Astaire never won a competitive Oscar. Rogers did. The way most people rank the pair has never caught up with that.

Her name was Virginia Katherine McMath when she arrived, delivered at home in Independence, Missouri, the only child of Lela Owens, a newspaper reporter, and William McMath, an electrical engineer. The marriage broke early. Her father kidnapped her twice before her mother divorced him, and she never saw him again. A young cousin who could not pronounce “Virginia” gave her the nickname that stuck, and when she was nine her mother married John Logan Rogers and moved the family to Fort Worth, Texas. Lela reviewed theatre for a local paper, and her daughter, waiting in the wings of the Majestic Theatre, learned to dance by copying the acts.

In 1925, at 14, she won a Charleston contest, and the prize was a vaudeville tour: six months on the Orpheum Circuit as Ginger Rogers and the Redheads. At 17 she married Jack Pepper, a singer and comic, and the pair worked briefly as “Ginger and Pepper” before the marriage collapsed within a year. New York kept her. She made her Broadway debut in Top Speed at the end of 1929, and within weeks the Gershwins cast her in Girl Crazy. The producers hired a dancer named Fred Astaire to help with the choreography. At 19, she was a Broadway star.

Hollywood took longer. Paramount used her in five features shot in Queens before she moved west and took work wherever a contract fell. The breakthrough came in supporting parts at Warner. She was Anytime Annie in 42nd Street, and in Gold Diggers of 1933 she sang “We’re in the Money” with a verse in Pig Latin. Then RKO put her down the bill of Flying Down to Rio, beside Astaire, and the two of them walked off with a film built for Dolores del Río.

Nine RKO musicals followed in six years, among them The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat and Swing Time, and they changed what a Hollywood musical could look like: long, unbroken takes of two bodies in full figure, set to songs Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern, among others, wrote for them. Astaire and Hermes Pan built the routines. Rogers made them read as courtship. The dance historian John Mueller put it plainly: she understood that acting did not stop when dancing began. Astaire, shortly before his death, remembered that every partner he had ever had cried at some point under his rehearsal schedule. “All except Ginger. No, no, Ginger never cried.”

She also wanted out, and she was right to. While the pairing still made money she proved herself alone, sparring with Katharine Hepburn in Stage Door, playing opposite James Stewart in Vivacious Lady and David Niven in Bachelor Mother. When Carefree lost money and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle became the weakest earner of the series, she had somewhere to go. Kitty Foyle brought the Oscar. The Major and the Minor, Billy Wilder‘s first Hollywood feature as director, cast her as a grown woman passing for a 12-year-old to buy a cheaper train ticket, with her own mother, Lela, playing her mother. By the middle of the 1940s she was the highest-paid performer in Hollywood. MGM reunited her with Astaire one last time for The Barkleys of Broadway only because Judy Garland could not take the part.

The phrase that now follows her everywhere is not hers. “She did everything he did, backwards and in high heels” comes from a 1982 Frank and Ernest comic strip by Bob Thaves, and it turned the partnership she had worked hard to leave into her feminist epitaph. She fought harder over another use of her name. When Federico Fellini’s Ginger and Fred opened in the United States, about two ageing Italian dancers who once made a living imitating the couple, Rogers sued the producers and the American distributor for exploiting her public persona. She lost. The federal appeals court in New York ruled in Rogers v. Grimaldi that an artistic work may carry a celebrity’s name in its title when the name has artistic relevance, and the “Rogers test” is still argued in trademark cases. The woman who spent a career trying to control how she was framed gave her name to the rule that says she could not.

The 1950s were thinner. She still landed Monkey Business for Howard Hawks, opposite Cary Grant with Marilyn Monroe in support, and the thriller Tight Spot with Edward G. Robinson. The stage gave her a second run. She took over as Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! on Broadway in 1965, and in 1969 she opened Mame at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London, where a 14-month run made her the highest-paid performer the West End had seen. In 1985, at 74, she finally directed, staging Babes in Arms in Tarrytown, New York. Her final screen role came in 1987, in an episode of Hotel, after guest turns in The Love Boat and Glitter.

She married five times, to Jack Pepper, Lew Ayres, Jack Briggs, Jacques Bergerac and William Marshall, and had no children. The constant was Lela, who negotiated her early RKO contracts and stayed at the centre of her life. Rogers was a lifelong Christian Scientist. She published her autobiography, Ginger: My Story, in 1991, received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1992, and died of a heart attack at her home in Rancho Mirage, California, on April 25, 1995, at 83. The theatre in Medford, Oregon, where she had played as a teenage vaudevillian in 1926 now carries her name: the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater.

Hollywood is about to tell the story again, and again from his side. In late September, Sony’s Fred Astaire biopic, directed by Paul King and written with Steven Levenson, cast Sabrina Carpenter as Rogers, with Tom Holland as Astaire and Margaret Qualley as his sister Adele. The film adapts Kathleen Riley’s The Astaires: Fred and Adele, a book about his first partner, not his most famous one, and no release date has been set. Anyone it sends back to the RKO films will find a dancer who made the hardest steps look like an argument she was winning, and an actress who, unlike the man she is still filed beside, won her Oscar for a performance.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, actresses, Sabrina Carpenter, Billy Wilder, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Swing Time, Top Hat

Featured News — Ginger Rogers

Movies

Sabrina Carpenter’s Ginger Rogers Is the Real Gamble in Tom Holland’s Fred Astaire Biopic

Music

Charlie Watts: Gentleman, Collector, Rolling Stone – Literature and Jazz, London, September 2023

See all →

Related People

Fred Astaire

Cher

Kate Mara

Kadeem Hardison

Dev Patel

Minka Kelly