Cyd Charisse, 1922 - 2008.

Cyd Charisse, the long-legged Texas beauty who danced with the Ballet Russes as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, died Tuesday. She was 86....

Classically trained, she could dance anything, from a pas de deux in 1946's Ziegfeld Follies to the lowdown Mickey Spillane satire of 1956's The Band Wagon (with Astaire).

The AP.

See also: the Cyd Charisse Appreciation Page, Legs, Wikipedia and YouTube.

Updated through 6/19.

Updates, 6/18: "Ballet provided the backbone of her rock-solid technique, yet when she danced straight ballet on screen, something was missing; in trying to be overly correct for ballet dancing, Charisse looked too tall, too leggy," writes Dan Callahan at the House Next Door. "But give her something jazzy, something modern, something fifties, and she does things with her body that are hard to describe, let alone understand." And he revisits the "five essential Cyd Charisse films."

"Looking back on her work with Kelly and Astaire during a 2002 interview in the New York Times, Ms Charisse said that her husband, [Tony] Martin, always knew whom she had been dancing with," writes Robert Berkvist. "'If I was black and blue,' she said, 'it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn't have a scratch.' In a 1992 interview with the Times, she remembered dancing with Astaire to Michael Kidd's demanding choreography in Silk Stockings and said admiringly, 'Fred moved like glass.'"

"The turning point came with her mesmerizing, erotically charged performance in Singin' in the Rain's extended dance sequence, 'Broadway Melody,' in which she appeared as a long-stemmed speak-easy queen in three inch heels, bobbed hair and a fringe dress seducing Gene Kelly's dumbstruck hoofer," notes Josh R at Edward Copeland on Film.

"The impossibly leggy, mildly exotic, confident almost to the point of camp Charisse added counterpoint nuance to Kelly's weird barrel-chested blue-collar ballet," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It never felt like it was a perfect pairing, and that was maybe what was exciting about it: as a partner and as a choreographer, Kelly knew how to use and play off their incongruities."

"She was strong, lithe and 'drop-dead gorgeous to look at,' dance/film historian and author Larry Billman said of Charisse in her breakthrough performance," writes Mary Rourke in the Los Angeles Times. "After years when Hollywood's leading dancers were cute and fluffy, Cyd took dance to a more sensual realm in the 1950s,' Billman said in a September 2007 interview with the Times."

"When I think of Charisse, my heart usually leaps straight to Brigadoon," writes Nathaniel R. "It appears in my mind's eye far more often than its fairytale time table of once every 100 years."

"She was simply the greatest female screen dancer who ever lived," writes C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark.

More from Robert Cashill.

"The rap on Cyd Charisse was that she was a far better dancer than an actress, but I don't care what you say," blogs the Boston Globe's Ty Burr: "The lady had presence."

"There were a lot of dancers who came up in the Hollywood system, but none were as elegant as Cyd Charisse," writes Marilyn Ferdinand. "Even when she sizzled, she reflected the refinement of her classical ballet training, and she was a model for dancers looking healthy instead of severely underfed."

Ronald Bergan opens his obit in the Guardian by noting that, in Singin' in the Rain, "In a few minutes, Charisse's film persona is encapsulated - at first cold and aloof, later melted by the love of the right man." And Band Wagon "featured two faces of Charisse, dark-haired and tough, or blonde and vulnerable. As Astaire says in the pastiche private-eye narration, 'She came to me in sections. She had more curves than a scenic railway.'"

"[T]he contrast between her usual lack of presence and the voltage she gave off as soon as she started throwing those legs around just made her seem that much more fascinating," writes Phil Nugent at Screengrab, "as if she were an ordinary mortal who had the ability, when her body heard the music, of communing with strange gods, from the hips down."

"[T]he Siren has a special place in her heart for Brigadoon for a number of reasons, but the greatest of these is undoubtedly that the movie was the first time she saw Cyd Charisse, the matchless dancer who died yesterday at age 86." And she's got a quote from David Shipman regarding that remarkable moment that appears in nearly every piece linked to in this entry:

If you were in an air-force cinema, circa 1952, you'll never forget the sound which greeted the appearance of Cyd Charisse halfway through the climactic ballet in Singin' in the Rain. The audience to a man greeted the sinuous leggy beauty with a loud and prolonged 'Ooooaah!' As she slithered round an understandably bewildered Gene Kelly, there was uproar in the cinema. Cyd Charisse didn't do more than dance in Singin' in the Rain and people remember her in it.

"The Siren leaves the final word to Astaire: 'That Cyd! When you've danced with her, you stay danced with.'"

Updates, 6/19: "It's impossible to imagine the Hollywood musical without her," writes Manohla Dargis. "Like the greatest American movie dancers, she showed how appearing on screen isn't just a matter of mouthing words, but also moving through and holding space. And she was a stunning physical specimen, at once lean and beautifully curved, with a wasp waist that seems to have been naturally designed for a man's hand to rest gently in its slope. She didn't do all that much with her face, though on occasion she let loose a deliciously evocative leer."

"And if I had to choose only one moment to remember Charisse by, it would be her silent duet with Astaire in The Band Wagon," writes Vera Klinkenborg, also in the New York Times. "The song is 'Dancing in the Dark,' the setting is Central Park, and, as usual, the overlapping illusions are nearly confounding. There they are - two professional dancers, carefully choreographed and rehearsed, playing two professional dancers dancing spontaneously on a soundstage that is meant to be Central Park, and all the while they are feigning an almost reproachful, amorous awareness of each other that conceals the hard-working awareness of two pros on the job. It was Cyd Charisse's remarkable gift to move through the hall of mirrors that is the American movie musical and never be caught glancing at herself."

Posted by dwhudson at June 17, 2008 4:38 PM