APPASSIONATI DI FRED ASTAIRE UNITEVI!

Fred Astaire and the art of fun An Oxford conference allows scholars, performers and fans to share their passion Paula Marantz Cohen Fred Astaire, who was born in 1899 in Omaha, Nebraska, began performing on the vaudeville circuit with his sister Adele. She was six; he was four and a half. Twenty years later, they were Broadway stars in such shows as George and Ira Gershwin’s Lady Be Good. This show and two others went on to even greater acclaim in London, where Adele met and married a British aristocrat, leaving Fred to forge a career on his own. Quickly, he made his way to Hollywood, where his “charm”, as David O. Selznick would say, was “so tremendous” that it overcame the famously dismissive studio assessment: “can’t act, can’t sing, balding, can dance a little”. Over the next twenty-five years, he would... [read full story]