Astaire, born Frederick Austerlitz, enjoyed a career spanning 76 years and a slew of hits, many with dance partner Ginger. The son of a brewer from Nebraska, Fred was performing with his sister Adele from the age of five, before he headed to Hollywood in 1932 and formed one of Tinseltown’s great partnerships – Fred and Ginger.
Fred and Ginger pictured in 1949
They struck box-office gold with Flying Down To Rio in 1933, and nine more movies with Ginger including Top Hat, which won four Oscar nominations.
At the height of his popularity in the late 30s, Fred was worth so much to the Hollywood studios he had his legs insured for $1 million.
After Flying Down to Rio, where they played second fiddle to Dolores del Rio and Gene Raymond, the following year they starred together in The Gay Divorcee.
Their subsequent films, including 1935’s Top Hat, 1936’s Follow the Fleet, 1936’s Swing Time and Shall We Dance in 1937. In his later years, he focused on dramatic acting, and won a Golden Globe nomination for his supporting turn in Stanley Kramer’s nuclear war drama On the Beach in 1959.
He earned his sole Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor for the disaster flick The Towering Inferno in 1974. The movie also brought him victories at the Golden Globes and BAFTA.
He won a Globe as Best Comedy/Musical Actor for Three Little Words in 1950, before being called up again for The Pleasure of His Company in 1961 and Finian’s Rainbow in 1968. He received an Honorary Oscar in 1950, the Cecil B. DeMille prize in 1961 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 1978.
On the TV side, Astaire won Emmys for An Evening with Fred Astaire in 1959 and Astaire Time in 1961, and the TV movie A Family Upside Down in 1978.
He announced his retirement in 1946 and opened his own dance studio, but was soon back when he replaced the injured Gene Kelly in Easter Parade in 1948, and he continued to make films until 1957 when he announced another short-lived retirement.
Fred pictured in 1985, two years before his death
A year later he was back in the spotlight with the first of four TV specials made over the next ten years that won multiple Emmys.
He turned straight actor later in life, appearing in disaster movie The Towering Inferno in 1974 at the age of 75, in his last film, Ghost Story, in 1981.
Fred married Boston-born New York socialite and former wife of Eliphalet Nott Potter III, Phyllis Potter in 1933, when she was 25.
His mother and sister objected to the union yet he determinedly pursued Phyllis for two years before she finally said yes.
Phyllis passed away after battling lung cancer in 1954. She was just 46. Her death left him to bring up their two children, Ava and Fred Junior, as well as Phyllis’s son from her former marriage, Peter.
He was left devastated by her passing and attempted to drop out of the 1955 film Daddy Long Legs – even offering to pay production, but he was then persuaded to stay.
On June 24, 1980, at the age of 81, his second wife Robyn Smith, who was 45 years his junior and a jockey who rode for Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt Jr. She appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated on July 31, 1972.
Ava previously revealed that Fred was a wonderful father, but had a bit of a temper. She said: ‘He had to take over my upbringing when I was 12 because we’d lost my mother and I became a companion to him as well as a daughter.
But if somebody said something to upset me, he’d go out and try and kill them.’
Fred died of pneumonia on June 22, 1987, at the age of 88, after which body was buried at Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California. His last request was to thank his fans for their years of support.
