He was one of the most famous actors and dancers of his era. Gene Kelly was known for this incredible athletic dance style he brought to numerous films through the '40s and '50s, including An American in Paris, Anchors Away and Singin' in the Rain.
Singin' in the rain, Wellington. Photo: RNZ / Alexander Robertson
He was also a singer, choreographer and director - he directed the 1969 film Hello, Dolly! starring Barbra Streisand.
Fans of Kelly's work will get a unique opportunity to view it at this year's Auckland Arts Festival, courtesy of his widow, Patricia Ward Kelly.
Patricia has helped create a stage show coming to the Auckland Arts Festival, and featuring the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, called Gene Kelly, a Life in Music.
The pair met in Kelly's later years - when she was a young writer commissioned to work on a documentary he was narrating. She had no idea who he was, she told RNZ's Nine to Noon.
A Herman Melville scholar and about as "nerdy as you can get," Kelly's glittering career had passed her by, she said.
Nevertheless, she was soon drawn to him.
"He spoke multiple languages. He spoke French, he spoke Italian, he spoke Yiddish, he read Latin, he wrote poetry. He was an economics major, he was really the true Renaissance man, and I might add, he was drop dead gorgeous and charming, and so I was completely enchanted.
"But I still didn't know he was famous until the final day, when he drove off, a woman next to me said, 'That guy's really famous, you should go to the video store and ask for Gene Kelly.' And I did, I came home with about 48 movies that I binge-watched over the weekend and was just stunned."
A romantic and professional relationship grew from there, she said.
"About six months later, he called me and asked me to come to California. He said he had some writing projects to work on, and so I did. And at the end of the weekend, he asked if I would stay and write his memoir with him.
"I said, yes figuring I'd probably spend about two weeks there interviewing him, but instead, I ended up recording him almost every day for over 10 years, and he finally got around to asking me to marry him about five years into it. So, we were married, but it was a kind of an extraordinary alliance."
Gene Kelly in 1943 Photo: Public Domain
Kelly was an intensely private man, she said, happiest at home immersed in a book.
"He just read voraciously, it was like an animal at the zoo, he would read a book, I don't mean any kind of book. I mean one day he said to me, 'I'd like to re-read all of Charles Dickens' and he did, and 'I would like to reread all of Evelyn Waugh', and he did, and the broad range of poetry, just devouring. He loved words. He loved the sound of words.
"And I would often find him sitting in the chair and he would just be repeating a word again and again because of the sound."
Growing up in Pittsburgh during the Depression, Kelly had no ambitions to be a dancer. Talented at almost everything he took on, he considered being a hockey player, a baseball player even a priest, she said.
"Then he decided he wanted to be a lawyer. He actually signed up for law school, and he bought the books and everything. But when he learned that it was just boring torts and learns, he thought it was going to be classic oratory like Clarence Darrow. And so, he sold his books."
He was then drawn to choreography, she said.
"He had had a dance school that he started in Pittsburgh, and it was a way to survive during the Depression, because a lot of people still were sending their kids to dance classes.
"And so, it was a way that his family could thrive during a very difficult time, and he loved to create the dances that the kids would perform, and some of the great choreographers from New York would tour through Pittsburgh with groups of kids, and Gene would choreograph for them."
Eventually, Kelly got his break in Hollywood and changed the way dance was captured on film forever.
"If you compare the musicals that come out in the '30s and '40s, they're very different from what Gene created. He literally took the dancing into the streets.
"He made the movement broad, wide open. He's tap dancing on roller skates, he's literally singing and dancing in the rain in the streets, and it changed the whole look of dance on film."
Patricia Ward Kelly Photo: supplied
Kelly's broader influence as a choreographer and director have tended to be overlooked, she said, something she aims to correct with the stage show.
"Often, during his lifetime, he was lopped off of the lists of great choreographers and directors and he would see Bobby Fosse on a list, but you don't get a Bobby Fosse without a Gene Kelly and even Fosse said that, and several other people, and even Alvin Ailey, the dancer, choreographer, credited Gene with his career.
"Because Gene is so prominent in Singin' in the Rain, people forget that he directed it and he choreographed it, and he's the first named director and choreographer, and he choreographed everything that you see him do. He was responsible for all of that."
He brought a muscularity to his routines, she said, absent from the polished-floor glides of contemporary Fred Astaire.
"Gene said, 'I don't want to dance like that. I don't want to do ballroom dancing on polished floors. I don't want to dance like a rich person'."
Adept at most forms of dance, Kelly was interested in using movement in film to tell a story, she said.
"He was a trained acrobat; he could walk a tightrope. He was a trained gymnast, so any form of movement he could do. He thought you should study every form of dance, because then you can play different characters, and you can use dance to propel the plot, instead of it just being sort of filler.
"In the movies before, you can often just cut the dance number out of the picture, and it doesn't really change the picture."
[ https://radionz.us6.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=211a938dcf3e634ba2427dde9&id=b3d362e693 Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero], a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
