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| Birth Name(s) : Virginia Katherine McMath |
Date of Birth: July 16, 1911 |
| Status:
N/A
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Partner:
N/A |
| Profession:
Actor/Musician |
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Full Ginger Rogers Biography
Virginia Katherine McMath was born on July 16, 1911 in Independence, Missouri. Her nickname, "Ginger," originated from her younger cousin Helen who pronounced "Virginia" as "Ginja." Family and friends continued to call her this, and later theatre men who understood the name to be "Ginger" billed her as such on their marquees.
Those who knew her as a little girl often said that Ginger could dance before she could walk. At the age of 10, she was appearing at local charity shows, celebrations and lodge meetings with her stepfather, "Daddy John," whose last name, Rogers, she eventually borrowed.
At the age of 14, young Ginger won the Texas State Charleston Championship. Her prize was four weeks of appearances in four Texas cities on the Interstate Theatre Circuit. She chose two red-headed Charleston dancers, and billed the act "Ginger and the Redheads." The performances continued well beyond their four-week engagement when Junior Orpheum sent the trio on an extensive tour across the western United States.
Ginger's first Broadway musical, Top Speed, featured her in the ingenue role. The show opened Christmas Day 1929 and ran for less than 20 weeks, but Ginger was hailed as a promising up-and-comer.
After Girl Crazy closed, Ginger moved on to Hollywood. Nineteen films into her career she joined Fred Astaire at RKO Radio Studios in Flying Down to Rio. The new team took the world by storm, subsequently making eight more pictures together at RKO: Gay Divorcee, Roberta, Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, Swing Time, Shall We Dance, Carefree and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. Ten years later they made their 10th film together for MGM, The Barkleys of Broadway.
While Ginger is best remembered for her stage and screen performances, she was also an accomplished artist. She was both a talented painter and sculptor and could have excelled in either had she more free time. She was offered a "one woman show" in New York, but declined indefinitely until she had more pieces to put on exhibit. An avid athlete as well, Ginger enjoyed golf, swimming, skeet shooting and tennis. She won several tennis cups and earned some high-score card records at skeet.
In the early 1970s, Ginger became the spokeswoman for JC Penney, designing a line of lingerie for them as well. Traveling thousands of miles across the United States, she delighted fans of all ages with her charm. A few years later, she took a very successful nightclub act to New York's Waldorf Astoria, Las Vegas, Sydney, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, San Francisco and a number of other cities in between. |
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Additional Ginger Rogers Biography
Ginger Rogers (July 16, 1911 – April 25, 1995) was an Academy Award-winning American film and stage actress and singer. In a film career spanning fifty years she made a total of seventy-three films, and is now principally celebrated for her role as Fred Astaire's romantic interest and dancing partner in a series of ten Hollywood musical films that revolutionized the genre.
Five years later her entertainment career was born one night when the traveling vaudeville act of Eddie Foy came to Fort Worth and needed a quick stand-in. She would enter and win a Charleston contest and then hit the road on a Vaudeville tour. Her mother and she would tour for four years. During this time her mother divorced John Rogers, but kept his surname.
When only 17 she married Jack Culpepper, another dancer on the circuit. The marriage was over within months, and she went back to touring with her mother. When the tour got to New York City, she stayed, getting radio singing jobs and then her Broadway theater debut in a musical called Top Speed, which opened on Christmas Day, 1929.
Ginger Rogers was most famous for her partnership with Fred Astaire. Together, from 1933 to 1939 they made nine musical films at RKO and in so doing, revolutionized the Hollywood musical, introducing dance routines of unprecedented elegance and virtuosity, set to songs specially composed for them by the greatest popular song composers of the day, and performed in some of the most glamorous Art Deco-inspired sets ever seen on film. To this day, "Fred and Ginger" remains an almost automatic reference for any successful dance partnership.Ginger with Fred Astaire in the film Roberta (1935).
Croce, Hyam and Mueller all consider Ginger Rogers to have been Astaire's finest dance partner, principally due to her ability to combine dancing skills, natural beauty and exceptional abilities as a dramatic actress and comedienne, thus truly complementing Astaire: a peerless dancer who sometimes struggled as an actor and was not considered classically handsome. The resulting song and dance partnership enjoyed a unique credibility in the eyes of audiences, as bluntly expressed by Katharine Hepburn: "She gives him sex, he gives her class." Of the 33 partnered dances she filmed with Astaire, Croce and Mueller have highlighted the infectious spontaneity of her performances in the comic numbers "I'll Be Hard to Handle" from Roberta (1935), "I'm Putting all My Eggs in One Basket" from Follow the Fleet (1936) and "Pick Yourself Up" from Swing Time (1936). They also point to the use Astaire made of her remarkably flexible back in classic romantic dances such as "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" from Roberta (1935), "Cheek to Cheek" from Top Hat (1935) and "Let's Face the Music and Dance" from Follow the Fleet (1936). For special praise, they have singled out her performance in the "Waltz in Swing Time" from Swing Time (1936), which is generally considered to be the most virtuosic partnered routine ever committed to film by Astaire. She generally avoided solo dance performances: Astaire always included at least one virtuoso solo routine in each film while Rogers only ever performed one: "Let Yourself Go" from Follow the Fleet (1936).Ginger Rogers' feet and hand prints at Grauman's Chinese theater
She lived for much of her life with her mother, Lela Rogers (1891–1977), who was a newspaper reporter, scriptwriter, and movie producer. Lela was also one of the first women to enlist in the Marine Corps, and was a founder of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.
Rogers's mother "named names" to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and both mother and daughter were staunchly anti-Communist. They had an extremely close mother-daughter relationship — Rogers's mother even denied Rogers's father visitation rights after their divorce.
A recent biography of actor James Stewart claims that Stewart lost his virginity to Ginger Rogers. (New York Times Book Review, Nov.2006)
Rogers was good friends with Lucille Ball (a distant cousin on her mother's side) for many years until Ball's death in 1989, at the age of 77. Ball did not seem to share Rogers's political views, but evidently still enjoyed her friendship, as did Bette Davis, a Democrat who definitely did not share Rogers's views and called her a "moralist", but still professed to enjoying her company.
Ginger Rogers was a cousin of actress/writer/socialite Phyllis Fraser (whose acting career was brief).
It has been said in books and other publications that Rogers was Rita Hayworth's cousin but they were not blood relatives. Their connection is as follows: Hayworth's mother's brother, Vinton Hayworth (Hayworth's uncle), was married to Rogers's mother's sister, Jean Owens (Rogers's aunt).
Rogers would spend the winters in Rancho Mirage, California, and the summers in Medford, Oregon. Ginger Rogers died on April 25, 1995, of congestive heart failure, at the age of 83, in Rancho Mirage, and was cremated. Her ashes are interred in the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California.
A musical about the life of Ginger Rogers, entitled Backwards in High Heels, premiered in Florida in early 2007. |
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Ginger Rogers Quote(s)
| I don't care what the critics say. My fabulous mom will give me a good review if nobody else does. |
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