Quotes about Fred Astaire

13 Sourced Quotes

While I was making my solo films, RKO was busily trying to get me and Fred Astaire back together. The studio wanted to capitalize on the success of 'Flying Down to Rio' and realized that the pairing of Rogers and Astaire had moneymaking potential.

Two big Cossacks have to carry him [Fred Astaire] protesting onto the dance floor, and there he does his longest and most absorbing solo of the series so far, full of stork-legged steps on toe, wheeling pirouettes in which he seems to be winding one leg around the other, and those ratcheting tap clusters that fall like loose change from his pockets.

I guess the only jewels of my life were the pictures I made with Fred Astaire.

The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.

After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.

Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat.

Over the years, myths were built up about my relationship with Fred Astaire. The general public thought he was a Svengali, who snapped his fingers for his little Trilby to obey; in their eyes, my career was his creation.

As Gloria Steinem said about Ginger Rogers: She was doing everything Fred Astaire was doing, just doing it backwards in high heels. Well, Southern women are doing and enduring what other women have to do and endure, but (at least until recently) they had to do it in heels and hats and white gloves and makeup and a sweet smile, with maybe a glass of bourbon and a cigarette to get them through the magnolia part of being a steel magnolia.

There's a life to dance that has to happen and it was seen years ago with Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and the life and the feeling they had in a performance. And when you watch them and you see them and you start to sway with them and you start to move with them and you miss that sometimes and that's what needs to happen with dance again.

Tabitha and Napoleon D'umo

Sure he (Fred Astaire) was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, backwards... and in high heels.

She had died peacefully, in her sleep, after an evening of listening to all of her favorite Fred Astaire songs, one crackling record after another. Once the last chord of the last piece had died out, she had stood up and opened the French doors to the garden outside, perhaps waiting to breathe in the honeysuckle one more time.

Dancing in Tijuana when I was 13 — that was my "summer camp." How else do you think I could keep up with Fred Astaire when I was 19?

We see people who dance really well and can't perform all the time. It's in our community, our dance community. It's like that because we've been doing back-up dancing for so long. We're always in the background of the movies and we're always behind the artist so our job is not to outshine the artist. Well now, with all these dance television shows, we're getting a chance to be the artist. We're on the forefront. We're the Gene Kellys and the Fred Astaires of this generation and it's our job to make people feel something and to really perform.

Tabitha and Napoleon D'umo