About Fred

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FRED ASTAIRE (1899–1987) had a career that few entertainers have matched for variety, longevity, and supremacy. The great high Modernist of twentieth-century dance, George Balanchine, described him as ‘the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times.’ But Astaire was not only a peerless dancer and technician, who revolutionized the art of dance on film and influenced generations of choreographers.

He was a man of many parts: an actor of some subtlety and nuance; a singer, who decried his own vocal prowess but who introduced more Great American Songs than any other performer; an innate musician, adept at several instruments, who wrote a tune that made the hit parade; and a notorious perfectionist and painstaking craftsman remembered for his on-screen embodiment of blithe insouciance.

He was personally a shy and unassuming man with a professed aversion to nostalgia and retrospective analysis. Yet his impact on world culture was profound. As Jerome Robbins once remarked: ‘He infused our souls with the visions that he made.’

With his wife, Phyllis, in 1939.