Fred Astaire, film star, dancer, actor and singer, died on 22nd June 1987

We are a day late with this, because of a clash of anniversaries yesterday with Judy Garland. Fred Astaire was born Frederick Austerlitz in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 10th 1899, and went on to become one of the major showbiz figures of the 20th century, his career encompassing dancing, stage, film and TV acting, singing and choreography. He was always destined for showbiz, his mother encouraging him and his sister to dance and perform, even moving the family to New York to pursue their careers. he and sister Adele started in Vaudeville, and when he met the young George Gershwin, it gave them a route into Broadway shows, starting with "Over The Top" in 1917. For the next 20 years performed in countless Broadway and London shows, perfecting dance techniques and routines, before finding his way into movies with RKO in the early '30s, despite a reportedly less-than-stunning screen test. He established his dancing partnership with Ginger Rogers, with whom he made ten films, including some of the biggest moneymakers of the golden age of Hollywood during the '30s. He had significant creative input into the presentation of his dancing on film, using a single-camera approach in direct contrast to Busby Berkeley's complex razzamataz. he retired twice in the forties and 50s, each time returning to take on new challenges with MGM in the '50s and then TV ventures and straight acting roles in the '60s and '70s. Although he was not regarded primarily as a singer, his involvement in introducing some of the finest material in the Great American Songbook as part of his stage and screen routines was enormous, performing material, both solo and in duets, by Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer and many more. Even a surface-scratching list of highlights would run to many more pages than we have available here. Acrobat has on catalogue an album of his recordings of a selection of these landmark pieces - for details click here.