Quotes of the Day

They were all dancers. James Cagney propelled himself through space like a bullet or a bull terrier, his torso a few seconds ahead of his legs; anyone without a dancer's equilibrium would have fallen on his face. Henry Fonda was just the opposite: a triumph of convex geometry, his thin body a question mark that ambled at Stepin Fetchit pace toward a girl or a cause. Katharine Hepburn seemed always on the ascendant, scaling the invisible ramp of her own confidence. But of all the Golden Age Hollywood stars it was Fred Astaire who defined screen movement, for the 30s and forever. With athletic nonchalance, he showed moviegoers how the human body could express strength, savoir-faire, rapture, amazing grace.

Astaire died 15 years ago today, and kept busy in films until his last decade. But his prime stretched for about 35 years, from the 1922 Broadway show "For Goodness' Sake" (his first Gershwin musical) to the 1957 "Funny Face" (his last original film musical, also with songs by George and Ira). He danced for 10 years on Broadway with his sister Adele, and in 10 Hollywood movies with Ginger Rogers. But in his signature tune from the show and film "The Band Wagon" he sang, "I'll go by way by myself" (available on the CD "Fred Astaire at M-G-M"). His achievement was solitary and unique — extensive and varied enough for the most esteemed practitioners of high, middle and low art to declare him the best.

On the high end, Mikhail Baryshnikov hailed him as the dancer of the century, and Jerome Robbins created a ballet in tribute to Astaire's "I'm Old Fashioned" dance with Rita Hayworth. Starchy Teutonic theorist Siegfried Kracauer praised him for injecting realism in Hollywood films by "dancing over table tops and down garden paths into the real world." Kracauer was totally wrong — Astaire didn't bring realism but rather a nonchalant nobility to movies — but it's touching that the nutty professor bent his theory to accommodate a tap dancer he loved.

Astaire, who made his name on the stage, just below that of his dancing sister Adele, inspired a recycled Broadway hit spun two generations later from his 20s Gershwin show "Funny Face" ("My One and Only" in the 80s). And on the low end, in the 1974 "Young Frankenstein," Mel Brooks duded up his monster (Peter Boyle) in top hat, white tie and tails to sing an Astaire favorite, "Puttin' on the Ritz."

Anyone with eyes can tell why Astaire was considered the great American dancer. He was the first with the most — the pioneer who was also the supreme refiner. Tap dancing had traditionally been all legwork, with the upper body stationary (think Gene Kelly). Astaire, as his teacher Ned Wayburn noted, "was the first American tap dancer to consciously employ the full resources of his arms, hands and torso for visual ornamentation." Then he integrated ballet and ballroom dance into his style. He wasn't grounded, in the old tap fashion; he floated, soared like Nijinsky. The mood of his dances also went beyond the comic energy of tap; his were stories of romance won and lost. Add to this his gorgeous poise and his teeming ingenuity as a choreographer (he was, essentially, the author of his dances) and you have a snapshot of dancing Fred.

There is also Astaire the singer; that takes some getting used to. His voice was thin, reedy, not quite suited for the high notes or large gestures of the standard tenor. But that was his genius: even before Bing Crosby, Astaire democratized singing. "Almost every great male icon of the art — Crosby, Sinatra, Tormé, Bennett — takes from Astaire," writes Steve Schwartz on Classical Net. "The male pop singer B.F. (before Fred) sounded something like an Irish tenor. ... The limitations of Astaire's voice forced him to find another way — deceptively casual, never oversold, and at home with the American vernacular. Astaire moved the 'scene' of the singer from the center of the great hall to just across the table, in effect replacing the Minstrel Boy with Ordinary Guy, U.S. version." Whereas Louis Armstrong abstracted a song's lyrics into a plangent growl, Astaire mined their meaning with mediocre vocal equipment. It's a coin toss to determine which one was the first modernist pop singer.

Granted, Astaire had some pretty good songs to sing. In the 30s, eight of his recordings went to #1 on the pop charts: Cole Porter's "Night and Day," Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek," "I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket" and "Change Partners," Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields' "The Way You Look Tonight" and "A Fine Romance," the Gershwins' "They Can't Take That Away from Me" and "Nice Work If You Can Get It." He had 18 other top 10 hits from these composers, and eight more in the top 20. In a genial symbiosis of creator and interpreter, Astaire inspired these giants to give him A material, which he then sold ever so suavely. As Schwartz notes, "Just about all the major American songwriters from the 20s on had written their best songs for Astaire. Astaire, in turn, gave them in many cases their best performances and in the process redefined pop singing."

FRED BEFORE GINGER

A half-century of Astaire in the movies has made his achievement seem both ineffable and inevitable. But back in 1932, when Fred came to Hollywood, moguls could be forgiven for not spotting a potential movie star. He and Adele had danced through hit Broadway shows for a dozen years, but Adele was the star; Fred was "and." In "Make Believe: The Broadway Musical in the 1920s," Ethan Mordden passes along a typical notice for the sibs' "Lady, Be Good": "Stark Young spent the first half of his Times review entirely on her — 'Adele Astaire Fascinates,' ran the headline — and could say no better of Fred than that he 'participates enthusiastically and successfully in most of Miss Astaire's dance offerings'." When audiences looked at Adele and Fred, they certainly thought she was fascinatin' with 'im, and probably without 'im too.

I know of no film documentation of Adele's work. She didn't make movies, and in 1932 she retired when she married Charles Cavendish, an English lord. She can be heard, though, on the CD "A Portrait of Fred Astaire," an invaluable compilation of his recordings from 1926 to 1938. In these duets with Fred, from their hit shows, Adele has a tweety soprano with no special warmth or color; maybe, those who saw her on Broadway might have said, you had to be there. What's beguiling about these early sides is Fred's attempt to find a style. The voice never grew, but his knowledge of lyric reading eventually did. (A few of the songs also have a chorus or two of Fred's tap dancing, which doesn't record well; to the great public outside New York, it sounded cold and clangorous, like late-night mischief in the back alley.)

To a Hollywood skeptic, appraising Fred for the first time, the Astaires' stage stardom could be attributed to snob appeal and second-balcony myopia. The fuss must have been about Adele. Look at her brother. In long shot Fred's body photographed small, fragile, bewildered. In close-up he looked — and, in moments of earthbound repose, acted — like Stan Laurel. Thus the famous pronouncement on Astaire's first screen test: "Can't act. Can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little." But oh, how he danced! That was evident from his second film, "Flying Down to Rio" (1933), when he was paired with a perky chorine named Ginger Rogers. Between then and 1939 Astaire and Rogers made eight films — and movie history.

FRED AND GINGER

It was Hepburn who said of Astaire-Rogers: "He gives her class. She gives him sex." Truth to tell, Fred gave Ginger more class than she gave him sex. Rogers was a showbiz cutie, just 21 when they were first paired (he was 33), and radiating healthy self-awareness more than eroticism; as Arlene Croce wrote in her vibrantly evocative critique "The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book," Ginger was "like a clever puppy who knows it's being watched." And, except metaphorically, there was no sex in their films; they typically played lovers who never got to kiss (except in the dream dance in "Carefree"). Yet they live in romance, on their flying, gliding feet.

The titles of their RKO movies changed — "Flying Down to Rio," "The Gay Divorcée," "Top Hat," "Roberta," "Follow the Fleet," "Swing Time," "Shall We Dance," "Carefree," "The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle" — but their roles were pretty constant. Fred was nature's nobleman, Ginger the plucky girl who made good by dancing well. It didn't matter that the films' plots were aggressively silly, the dialogue often inane. The musical numbers had a formula too: Fred courting Ginger, pursuing her in song and dance, while she ponders her ethical or emotional reservations to dancing-romancing; he approaches, she retreats. But when the music swelled, and Fred took Ginger by the hand, and she leaned into his body, and the dance began, a more beautiful story was told: of the emotions only motion can convey, of two people's need for transcendence, of the perfect fusion of passion and technique into a delicate but powerful sensuality.

It all looked impossibly easy. It was not: six weeks of rehearsal before every film, dozens of takes, worn-out shoes, bleeding feet. In 1981, Astaire looked back on his career for a TIME story I wrote. (I've borrowed some of that piece for this one). He told Correspondent Martha Smilgis that making the Fred-and-Ginger films was like "running the four-min. mile for six months. I'd lose 15 lbs. during rehearsal. But then you'd get in a winning groove — a kind of show-business dream sequence where you can't do anything wrong. The choreography was a mutual effort: Hermes Pan, Ginger, even Adele contributed. And of course Ginger was able to accomplish sex through dance. We told more through our movements instead of the big clinch. We did it all in the dance."

I know some people who think Ginger didn't do it all — at least not at all well. I sat with Davie Lerner, once a dancer with the New York City Ballet and long an amatory scholar of dance in all its forms, and watched "Isn't It a Lovely Day" from "Top Hat." Davie couldn't withhold his informed scorn about Rogers' performance: she can't make the leap, her gestures lack refinement, she's looking at her feet — she's looking at his feet! I confess the experience was deflating, like getting severe criticism of your girl friend from your best friend.

Someone (many people) noted that Ginger did everything Fred did, only backward and in high heels. That's not quite true. She didn't choreograph; she didn't drive the movie and the performers. And even I can see that, though Rogers was in Astaire's dancing class (as a precocious student), she wasn't in his dancing class (as an equal). His gestures are indeed larger, more precise and graceful, than hers. But ultimately that doesn't trouble me. The story of the films is one of aristocratic Fred elevating shopgirl Ginger to his level, and of Ginger bringing Fred down to hers; each brings out the best in the other. Croce says of the team: "They weren't Alfred [Lunt] and Lynn [Fontanne] and they weren't Noel [Coward] and Gertie [Lawrence]; they were the two most divinely usual people in the history of movies." If that's the case, then Ginger is at the soul of the movie. She was divinely usual. He was, usually, divine.

How to pick the best Astaire-Rogers number? Robbins and Brooks had their favorites; Kracauer's reference is to "The Yam" from "Carefree," which is also the choice of Entertainment Weekly's Ty Burr. I love "Pick Yourself Up," another you-hate-me-now-but-when-we-dance-you'll-like me number, from "Swing Time." And I can't imagine a more beautiful expression of reluctant rapture than Ginger's in the "Cheek to Cheek" dance from "Top Hat." And not just the song (Berlin's finest) or the dance (one of Astaire's most brilliant). I'm thinking of the coda: a startlingly suspenseful 12 seconds of silence as Ginger considers the ecstasy she has just shared with a man she believes to be married. It's post-coital remorse and wistfulness at its most poignant.

In 1981 I voted (with my typewriter) for the "Swing Time" number "Never Gonna Dance," an eight-minute ballet of seduction and parting. This time the quarrel is at the end of the movie. The bickering lovers won't dance ... they must dance. Their bodies sway helplessly to the Kern music, then surrender to embrace. Retreating, touching, whirling across the ballroom floor, they try to fight the magnetism of their love, their shared art. The only way to escape its pull is to play the game to its climax. And so they glide up a winding staircase and into the spiraling ecstasy of a dozen dizzying pirouettes. Suddenly she is gone. He is alone. The dance is over.

ANATOMY OF A DANCE

It's not their most famous song or dance; it hasn't the grand romantic sweep of "Cheek to Cheek" or "Never Gonna Dance." And Davie Lerner makes me feel guilty for choosing it. But I'm sticking with "Isn't This a Lovely Day," the Irving Berlin number from "Top Hat" — a superb parable of pursuit, resistance and union: a getting-to-know-you story that becomes a dance of sexy-romantic joy.

The 5min.10sec. sequence (filmed in a mere six shots, and with most of the dance done in just two shots) is Fred's test to see how far Ginger will follow him — as a dancer, because in these movies to dance is to love — and how expertly she can keep up with him. Astaire's singing, Rogers' silent re-acting and the pair's dance coax each bit of drama and humor out of the lyric and music. What follows is my attempt to render complex emotions and glorious movement in prose; it's just the Cliff Notes to a blithe masterpiece. So rent or buy the "Top Hat" VHS. And get the album, "Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers at RKO," two CDs of great music and fabulous vibes. Right now. I'll wait.

Welcome back. The song's setting is a gazebo in a London park, to which Ginger has repaired because of threatening weather. Fred is there too; they've met before, in strained circumstances, and she feels uneasy in his presence. He wears a business suit, she's in riding gear with a cute fedora. A thunderclap sends her rushing into his arms for shelter. Chagrined at her momentary dependence on him, she retreats. Nonchalantly, he explains that a storm is Nature's way of showing how two people come together. A boy cloud and a girl cloud spark, and that's lightning. "They kiss. Thunder!" There's a thunderclap (Fred controls all the elements here) that gooses Ginger out of her seat. As he starts the verse ("The weather is frightening,/ The thunder and lightning/ Seem to be having their way,/ But as far as I'm concerned/ It's a lovely day"), she sighs — lord, he's going to sing — then rises, walks away and briefly touches her chest. Is it from fear, anxiety or excitement?

The chorus begins, and she rolls her eyes exasperatedly at his conversational come-on: "Isn't this a lovely day to be caught in the rain?" She's heard this line before; the spoiled princess has played this game before. Biting her lip, she sits down, and he sits next to her, but really behind her, so we can see her singing into her ear. She rarely looks back at him. In the first few bars Fred keeps time by lightly slapping his thigh three times. A few bars later, Ginger keeps time with her riding crop; is it a leather metronome, or a potential instrument of torture?

Despite herself, she smiles at his line — "The clouds broke/ They broke and/ Oh, what a break for me!" — and the corniness of his stage-tenor rendition; he's given a vocal swoop to it and, on "Me," touched his heart. Will this rain never stop? She apprehensively glances outside; no change in the weather. He finishes the chorus with "Long as I can be with you/ It's a lovely day." She's still not won over.

The vocal is followed by three dance choruses, each one faster, jazzier, each bringing the adversaries closer to detente. After singing, Fred rises, twirls, strolls around the gazebo and whistles. Seated, not yet giving in, she whistles too. He walks past her, crooking his arm where hers might slip through. She doesn't take his arm, but does rise to follow him. They take a stroll, left hand in a pants pocket, then both hands in pockets; each step is a bit springier than the last. He is luring her out of a walk and into a dance.

As the music breaks (at, aptly, the moment where the vocal would be "Oh what a break for me"), Fred executes his first big figure, spinning toward us and giving it a showbizzy, hands-out finish, then folding his arms as if waiting for Ginger to foul up. He dares her to match him and, through competition, to be a partner in his dance-romance. She does the same step, but to the left, with smaller arm elevation, and, instead of the beseeching capper, ends with a modest stamp of her right foot — abrupt, dismissive, ever-so-slightly Fred-deflating. Her message to him: she's still just jaunting, not joining in. She won't dance, don't ask her.

Ginger strolls away from Fred. He follows her, and as they move upstage she throws in a cute little step that the music doesn't allow him to duplicate — a cheap little triumph that he acknowledges by wheeling on one foot and raising his hand to his mouth. For 12 bars they do some snazzy vaudeville tap figures in synch and turn in toward each other. This is the moment when dancers would normally embrace and spin off together, but these two stop just short of touching. This tactic continues through most of the number: every time the music, or their steps, seem ready to force them into a clutch, or at least a collision, they stop short and back off. Facing close — his hands open to hold her, hers raised to him like a crossing guard's Stop signal — they hop, like adversaries concerned they may be warming to each other. The pace accelerates, and their taps echo the new agitation.

As the second dance chorus begins, the two face each other, this close, and stop, each briefly folding arms in a gesture of defiance or daring: okay, what'll you try now? The music persuades them to sway in syncopation, then to enlarge the movement, describing a circle as their arms swinging wider (right, left, four times each). They stop, twirl, clap hands simultaneously and (on "Oh what a break") do a ten-tap strut to the front of the gazebo, landing in synch on the right foot. The first time, Ginger had to undercut Fred's flourish; this time she's with him.

Ginger has now decided she'll play or work along with this persistent fellow, because he's so darned good. She's smiling when they scoot back onto the platform, in smart half-turns that lead to a triple twist for her. Their movements are freer, more familiar; competition is giving way to camaraderie. For the first time the two touch, though only to push the other off into a tandem of quadruple spins. Facing each other at the end of the second dance chorus, they hop again, this time like gleefully agitated kids.

It's time for the final, fastest dance chorus. Lightning and a thunderclap cue a quick change in the emotional weather. Ginger hears this, but she's not frightened, as she was a few minutes ago; now she's jizzed. The horn section starts bleating like impatient klaxons, modulates seven times, up the whole scale, as the dancers do slide-taps, facing each other, too close for comfort. Something's got to give, and it's the music. The trumpet blasts a kind of sexual cavalry call, to which the two respond with a furious stomp; they've got firecracker feet. Fred takes Ginger in his arms and leads her in eight spins, as delirious as they are precise. The courtship is over. This is the real thing: sex as hot, fast fun, two people in perfectly matched abandon, too rapt to notice their surprise at the other's expertise, at how beautifully and energetically they dance as one.

Facing each other, they tap again, each step ever bouncier, and at the Oh-what-a-break break, they do a quick Lindy, their arms airplane wings. Now the band plays games: four times, they blare a five-note sequence and stop; Fred and Ginger fill in each pause with their own pedal percussion. He lifts her into a ballroom spin and, what the heck, she lifts him into one! This brings them out to the front of the gazebo, toward us. They stick their hands out, see that it's still raining and decide to sit it out in some newfound friendly company. Perched cross-legged under the eave, with no hint of post-workout, post-coital exhaustion, they smile and shake hands. Fred's grin is broader: he's found a partner.

FRED AFTER GINGER

When the team split, Astaire kept doing it all on his own. His dancing partners over the next 20 years included some prime enchantresses: Rita Hayworth, Judy Garland, Cyd Charisse, Leslie Caron, Audrey Hepburn, Barrie Chase. But Astaire's solos became his signature pieces. On his own, he used stage props — and the properties of film — as cleverly as he had earlier translated stage dance to the screen. He defied time by dancing in slow motion in "Easter Parade," defied gravity by dancing up walls and across ceilings in "Royal Wedding," defied age by hoofing serenely through his sixth, seventh and eighth decades. He conquered television with a brace of specials in the late 50s. He turned to straight acting and won an Oscar nomination (his first!) for his performance in "The Towering Inferno." In his 81st year he took a wife less than half his age: thoroughbred jockey Robyn Smith.

In his chair days Astaire kept active; not for him the idle reverie of days and dances gone by. He rarely watched his old films, and told Smilgis he shuddered to think that they are among the most popular Late Show offerings. "When we did them I thought, 'OK, that's over.' But here they are forever on TV. Two hundred years from now they'll be watching 'Top Hat.' Oh, God!"

They are still watching "Top Hat" today (you did rent that cassette, didn't you?). After his death at 88 on June 22, 1987, Astaire never vanished, never even dimmed, from popular esteem. He became the icon for what was once the aristocracy of popular culture. He surely represents that to me; I've already written about him for TIME.com, in That Old Feeling columns on Irving Berlin and Gene Kelly. In 1998 I wrote a TIME piece called "High and Low," about the devolution of the people's art. " Start with two fellows from Omaha, Neb., born 25 years apart. One was frail, comical-looking, yet he epitomized elegance in an era when glamour was the ability to steer a slim lady around a dance floor. The other man was bulky, brooding, with the artistic mission to break things: women's hearts, codes of behavior, the very notion of 'good acting.' In their distinct ways — grace vs. power, gentility vs. menace, tux vs. torn T shirt — Fred Astaire and Marlon Brando represented the poles of 20th century popular culture. Astaire gave it class; Brando gave it sex."

In the pop culture war, sex won — real, insolent, dirty sex, not Ginger's kind. And class went to the back of the class. It sits there, ignored and aloof, waiting for the young to recognize it. Can't they see how sensational that slim figure back there looks in his top hat, white tie and tails, as an indulgent smile plays on his face and his feet describe elaborate designs on the schoolroom floor? Can't they see that Britney Spears is not dance — that Fred Astaire is? I hope, some day, the kids will get Astaire. He's too cool to be the property of fogies like me.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on the 20th century's great dancer-singer