Gene Kelly

Gene Kelly never wanted to be a swan. While other dancers of his era chased the lightness of air, he preferred the weight of the ground and the sweat of the working class. He was an athlete from Pittsburgh who understood movement as a tool for building something massive.

In 1942 he made his film debut with For Me and My Gal. It was not an easy road, since his style clashed with the elegance standards of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. But Kelly had an obsession that went beyond dance steps: he wanted to control the camera.

Before his arrival, musical numbers were filmed in a static way (almost as if the viewer were sitting in a theater seat). So he decided the camera should dance with the star. In 1945 he shot Anchors Aweigh and convinced the studio to dance with a cartoon mouse.

The Camera as Enemy

In 1949, he shot On the Town and took the cameras out onto the streets of New York. It was a risky move, since studio executives hated shooting outside controlled soundstages. Kelly won the battle and proved that realism didn't kill the magic of the musical.

And the gamble paid off.

But his big moment came in 1952. Everyone remembers the rain scene in Singin' in the Rain as a moment of pure joy. The technical reality was much harsher. Kelly shot that sequence with a 39-degree fever and under a mix of water and milk so the drops would show up better on screen.

There was no magic, just physical endurance.

The Twilight of the Studio Sets

By the mid-50s the studio system began to fall apart. Audiences wanted darker stories, and the bright, saturated musical lost its box-office appeal. In 1955 he directed It's Always Fair Weather, a film far more bitter than his earlier work.

He tried to adapt to conventional film directing. In 1969 he stepped behind the camera for Hello, Dolly! with a budget of nearly 25 million dollars. It was a tense shoot where his old-school methods clashed head-on with a young Barbra Streisand.

Because the movie musical was dying.

In 1980, he accepted a role in Xanadu. It was his last appearance in a movie musical, and critics tore the film apart without mercy. Despite the commercial flop, the soundtrack sold millions of copies worldwide.

In 1952, he received an honorary Oscar for his contribution to film. He never won the award in a competitive acting category. He died on February 2, 1996, after suffering a series of strokes that kept him out of the public eye during his final months.