Fred Astaire Part I

I can’t dance.. never been any good at it, but I love to watch dance in the old musicals.  And Fred Astaire is the best.  The joke was that at first one of his screen tests reported that he “Can’t sing, can’t act, balding, can dance a little”.  But while he didn’t have a wonderful singing voice, he could sing.. He could act too... And in later life, took a number of dramatic roles.

Fred was born in Omaha Nebraska as Frederick Austerlitz…  His mother was American but his father was from a Jewish family in Austria who had converted to Roman Catholicism. His father had moved to America to make a living and got a job in Omaha in a Brewing company.  However his mother was an ambitious lady who hope that she could escape provincial life vie the talents of her children.  Her daughter Adele was a talented child dancer.  Fred didn’t want to learn to dance, but he learned various musical instruments.  In 1905, when he was only 6 his father Fritz lost his job, and his mother decided to move them to New York to try and start a stage career. Fred was a natural dancer and had watched his sister, and on their move to New York, the 2 children took lessons in stagecraft, dancing and so on… 

Fritz was a smart businessman with a talent for promotion and Adele and Fred made a great start in Vaudeville as a dance act.  They worked together for a few years but Adele was rather taller than her brother and they began to look incongruous. 

They took a break from showbusiness for a couple of years.  They learned tap which was a new thing and ballroom dancing... and they had shortened their name to the snappier “Astaire”…

In 1912, Fred became an Episcopalian…. 

Within a couple of years, he was the dominant partner in the act, chasing up songs and music to dance to and by then he had developed the passion for perfection that drove him to be so great an artist. In 1917, the Astaires had a show on Broadway, a revue called Over the Top.  They followed up by several other Broadway shows.  Adele was a sparkling comic and a good dancer but her brother was beginning to overshadow her.

In the 1920s, they went to London, where they performed in shows such as Jerome Kern's The Bunch and Judy (1922), George and Ira Gershwin's Lady, Be Good (1924), and Funny Face (1927) and The Band Wagon.  Fred became friends with the Gershwin, and with Noel Coward….

Their act was admired in London and New York, and Fred was seen as the brilliant performer that he had become.

 In the later 1920s, Adele fell in love with Lord Charles Cavendish, a younger son of the Duke of Devonshire and they moved to a house in Ireland for a time.  Adele was happy to retire from the stage, which was traumatic for Fred... who was passionately devoted to his work. He worried about losing his partner, and whether he would be able to go on dancing without her…