Ginger Rogers (born Virginia Katherine McMath; July 16, 1911 – April 25, 1995) was an American actress, dancer, and singer during the "
Golden Age" of Hollywood and is often considered an American icon. She won an
Academy Award for Best Actress for her starring role in
''Kitty Foyle'' (1940), but is best remembered for performing during the 1930s in
RKO's
musical films with
Fred Astaire. Her career continued on stage, radio and television throughout much of the 20th century.
Born in
Independence, Missouri, and raised in
Kansas City, Rogers and her family moved to
Fort Worth, Texas when she was nine years old. After winning a 1925 Charleston dance contest
that launched a successful
vaudeville career, she gained recognition as a
Broadway actress for her stage debut in ''
Girl Crazy''. This led to a contract with
Paramount Pictures, which ended after five films. Rogers had her first successful film roles as a supporting actress in ''
42nd Street'' (1933) and ''
Gold Diggers of 1933'' (1933).
In the 1930s, Rogers' nine films with Fred Astaire are credited with revolutionizing the genre and gave
RKO Pictures some of its biggest successes, most notably ''
The Gay Divorcee'' (1934), ''
Top Hat'' (1935) and ''
Swing Time'' (1936). But after two commercial failures with Astaire, she turned her focus to dramatic and
comedy films. Her acting was well received by critics and audiences in films such as ''
Stage Door'' (1937), ''
Vivacious Lady'' (1938), ''
Bachelor Mother'' (1939), ''
The Major and the Minor'' (1942) and ''
I'll Be Seeing You'' (1944). After winning the Oscar, Rogers became one of the biggest box-office draws and highest paid actresses of the 1940s.
Rogers' popularity was peaking by the end of the decade. She reunited with Astaire in 1949 in the commercially successful ''
The Barkleys of Broadway.'' She starred in the successful comedy ''
Monkey Business'' (1952) and was critically lauded for her performance in ''
Tight Spot'' (1955) before entering an unsuccessful period of filmmaking in the mid-1950s, and returned to Broadway in 1965, playing the lead role in ''
Hello, Dolly!'' More Broadway roles followed, along with her stage directorial debut in 1985 of an off-Broadway production of ''
Babes in Arms''. She continued to act, making television appearances until 1987 and wrote an autobiography ''Ginger: My Story'' which was published in 1991. In 1992, Rogers was recognized at the
Kennedy Center Honors. She died of natural causes in 1995, at age 83.
Rogers is associated with the phrase "backwards and in high heels", which is attributed to
Bob Thaves' ''
Frank and Ernest'' 1982 cartoon with the caption "Sure he
stairewas great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did...backwards and in high heels". This phrase is erroneously attributed to
Ann Richards, who used it in her keynote address to the
1988 Democratic National Convention.
A
Republican and a devout
Christian Scientist, Rogers married and divorced five times, having no children. During her long career, Rogers made 73 films and she ranks number 14 on the
AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars list of female stars of classic American cinema.
Early life

Virginia Katherine McMath was born on July 16, 1911, in
Independence, Missouri, the only child of
Lela Emogene (''
née'' Owens; 1891–1977), a newspaper reporter, scriptwriter, and movie producer, and William Eddins McMath (1880–1925), an electrical engineer.
Her maternal grandparents were Wilma Saphrona (''née'' Ball) and Walter Winfield Owens.
She was of Scottish, Welsh, and English ancestry. Her mother gave birth to Ginger at home, having lost a previous child in a hospital.
Her parents separated shortly after she was born.
After unsuccessfully trying to reunite with his family, McMath kidnapped his daughter twice, and her mother divorced him soon thereafter.
Rogers said that she never saw her natural father again.
In 1915, Rogers moved in with her grandparents, who lived in nearby
Kansas City, while her mother made a trip to
Hollywood in an effort to get an essay she had written made into a film.
Lela succeeded and continued to write scripts for Fox Studios.
Rogers was to remain close to her grandfather and much later, when she was a star in 1939, she bought him a home at 5115 Greenbush Avenue in
Sherman Oaks, California, so he could be close to her while she was filming at the studios.
One of Rogers' young cousins, Helen, had a hard time pronouncing "Virginia", shortening it to "Badinda"; the nickname soon became "Ginga".
When Rogers was nine years old, her mother married John Logan Rogers. Ginger took the surname Rogers, although she was never legally adopted. They lived in
Fort Worth. Her mother became a theater critic for a local newspaper, the ''Fort Worth Record''. She attended, but did not graduate from, Fort Worth's Central High School (later renamed
Green B. Trimble Technical High School).
As a teenager, Rogers thought of becoming a school teacher, but with her mother's interest in Hollywood and the theater, her early exposure to the theater increased. Waiting for her mother in the wings of the Majestic Theatre, she began to sing and dance along with the performers on stage.
Career
1925–1929: Vaudeville and Broadway
Rogers' entertainment career began when the traveling
vaudeville act of
Eddie Foy came to Fort Worth and needed a quick stand-in. In 1925 the 14-year-old entered and won a
Charleston dance contest, the prize allowed her to tour as Ginger Rogers and the Redheads for six months on the
Orpheum Circuit. In 1926 the act performed at an 18-month-old theater called
The Craterian in
Medford, Oregon. This theater honored her years later by changing its name to the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater. When the M.G.M film ''
The Barrier'' premiered in
San Bernardino, California in February 1926, Rogers’ vaudeville act was featured. The local newspaper commented, “Clever little Ginger Rogers showed why she won the Texas state championship as a Charleston dancer.”
At 17, Rogers married Jack Culpepper, a singer/dancer/comedian/recording artist of the day who worked under the name
Jack Pepper (according to Ginger's autobiography and ''Life'' magazine, she knew Culpepper when she was a child, as her cousin's boyfriend).
They formed a short-lived vaudeville double act known as "Ginger and Pepper". The marriage was over within a year, and she went back to touring with her mother.
When the tour got to New York City, she stayed, getting radio singing jobs and then her Broadway debut in the musical ''
Top Speed'', which opened on
Christmas Day, 1929.
Within two weeks of opening in ''Top Speed'', Rogers was chosen to star on Broadway in ''
Girl Crazy'' by
George Gershwin and
Ira Gershwin. Fred Astaire was hired to help the dancers with their choreography. Her appearance in ''Girl Crazy'' made her an overnight star at the age of 19.
1929–1933: Early film roles

Rogers' first movie roles were in a trio of short films made in 1929—''Night in the Dormitory'', ''A Day of a Man of Affairs'', and ''Campus Sweethearts''. In 1930,
Paramount Pictures signed her to a seven-year contract.
Rogers soon got herself out of the Paramount contract—under which she had made five feature films at
Astoria Studios in
Astoria, Queens—and moved with her mother to Hollywood. When she got to California, she signed a three-picture deal with
Pathé Exchange. Two of her pictures at Pathé were ''
Suicide Fleet'' (1931) and ''
Carnival Boat'' (1932) in which she played opposite future Hopalong Cassidy star,
William Boyd. Rogers also made feature films for Warner Bros., Monogram, and Fox in 1932, and was named one of 15
WAMPAS Baby Stars. She then made a significant breakthrough as Anytime Annie in the
Warner Bros. film ''
42nd Street'' (1933). She went on to make a series of films at Warner Bros. most notably in ''
Gold Diggers of 1933'' where her solo, "We're In The Money", included a verse in
Pig Latin. She then moved to
RKO Studios, was put under contract and started work on
"''Flying Down To Rio"'''','' a picture starring
Dolores Del Rio and
Gene Raymond but it was soon stolen by Rogers and Broadway star
Fred Astaire.
1933–1939: Partnership of Rogers and Astaire
Rogers was known for her partnership with Fred Astaire. Together, from 1933 to 1939, they made nine musical films at RKO: ''
Flying Down to Rio'' (1933), ''
The Gay Divorcee'' (1934), ''
Roberta'' (1935), ''
Top Hat'' (1935), ''
Follow the Fleet'' (1936), ''
Swing Time'' (1936), ''
Shall We Dance'' (1937), ''
Carefree'' (1938), and ''
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle'' (1939). ''
The Barkleys of Broadway'' (1949) was produced later at MGM. They revolutionized the Hollywood musical by introducing dance routines of unprecedented elegance and virtuosity with sweeping long shots set to songs specially composed for them by the greatest popular song composers of the day. One such composer was
Cole Porter with
"Night and Day", a song Astaire sang to Rogers with the line "...you are the one" in two of their movies, being particularly poignant in their last pairing of ''The Barkleys of Broadway.''
Arlene Croce,
Hermes Pan, Hannah Hyam, and
John Mueller all consider Rogers to have been Astaire's finest dance partner, principally because of her ability to combine dancing skills, natural beauty, and exceptional abilities as a dramatic actress and comedian, thus truly complementing Astaire, a peerless dancer. The resulting song and dance partnership enjoyed a unique credibility in the eyes of audiences.
Of the
33 partnered dances Rogers performed with Astaire, Croce and Mueller have highlighted the infectious spontaneity of her performances in the comic numbers "
I'll Be Hard to Handle" from ''Roberta'', "
I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket" from ''Follow the Fleet'', and "
Pick Yourself Up" from ''Swing Time''. They also point to the use Astaire made of her remarkably flexible back in classic romantic dances such as "
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" from ''Roberta'', "
Cheek to Cheek" from ''Top Hat'', and "
Let's Face the Music and Dance" from ''Follow the Fleet''.
Although the dance routines were choreographed by Astaire and his collaborator
Hermes Pan, both have testified to her consummate professionalism, even during periods of intense strain, as she tried to juggle her many other contractual film commitments with the punishing rehearsal schedules of Astaire, who made at most two films in any one year. In 1986, shortly before his death, Astaire remarked, "All the girls I ever danced with thought they couldn't do it, but of course they could. So they always cried. All except Ginger. No, no, Ginger never cried".
John Mueller summed up Rogers' abilities as: "Rogers was outstanding among Astaire's partners, not because she was superior to others as a dancer, but, because, as a skilled, intuitive actress, she was cagey enough to realize that acting did not stop when dancing began...the reason so many women have fantasized about dancing with Fred Astaire is that Ginger Rogers conveyed the impression that dancing with him is the most thrilling experience imaginable".
Author Dick Richards, in his book ''Ginger: Salute to a Star'', quoted Astaire saying to Raymond Rohauer, curator at the New York Gallery of Modern Art, "Ginger was brilliantly effective. She made everything work for her. Actually she made things very fine for both of us and she deserves most of the credit for our success."
In a 1976 episode of the popular British talk-show
Parkinson (Season 5-Episode 24), host
Sir Michael Parkinson asked Astaire who his favorite dancing partner was. Astaire answered, "...Ginger. She was the one. You know, the most effective partner I ever had. Everyone knows."
In her classic 1930s musicals with Astaire, Ginger Rogers, co-billed with him, was paid less than Fred, the creative force behind the dances, who also received 10% of the profits. She was also paid less than many of the supporting "farceurs" billed beneath her, in spite of her much more central role in the films' great financial successes. This was personally grating to her and had effects upon her relationships at RKO, especially with director
Mark Sandrich, whose purported disrespect of Rogers prompted a sharp letter of reprimand from producer
Pandro Berman, which she deemed important enough to publish in her autobiography. Rogers fought hard for her contract and salary rights and for better films and scripts.
After 15 months apart and with RKO facing bankruptcy, the studio paired Fred and Ginger for another movie titled ''Carefree'', but it lost money. Next came ''The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle,'' based on a true story, but the serious plot and tragic ending resulted in the worst box-office receipts of any of their films. This was driven not by diminished popularity, but by the hard 1930s economic reality. The production costs of musicals, always significantly more costly than regular features, continued to increase at a much faster rate than admissions.
1933–1939: Success in nonmusicals
Both before and immediately after her dancing and acting partnership with Fred Astaire ended, Rogers starred in a number of successful nonmusical films. ''
Stage Door'' (1937) demonstrated her dramatic capacity, as the loquacious yet vulnerable girl next door and tough-minded theatrical hopeful, opposite
Katharine Hepburn. Successful comedies included ''
Vivacious Lady'' (1938) with
James Stewart, ''
Fifth Avenue Girl'' (1939), where she played an out-of-work girl sucked into the lives of a wealthy family, and ''
Bachelor Mother'' (1939), with
David Niven, in which she played a shop girl who is falsely thought to have abandoned her baby.
In 1934, Rogers sued
Sylvia of Hollywood for $100K for defamation. The fitness guru and radio personality had claimed that Rogers was on her radio show when, in fact, she was not.
On March 5, 1939, Rogers starred in "Single Party Going East", an episode of ''
Silver Theater'' on
CBS radio.
1940–1949: Career peak and reuniting with Astaire
thumbnail|alt=Rogers as her character Kitty Foyle on the cover of ''Life''|''Life'' cover featuring Kitty Foyle, her Oscar-winning role
In 1941 Rogers won the
Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in 1940's ''
Kitty Foyle''. She enjoyed considerable success during the early 1940s, and was RKO's hottest property during this period. In ''
Roxie Hart'' (1942), based on the same play which later served as the template for the musical ''
Chicago'', Rogers played a wisecracking flapper in a love triangle on trial for the murder of her lover; set in the era of prohibition. Most of the film takes place in a women's jail.
In the neorealist ''
Primrose Path'' (1940), directed by
Gregory La Cava, she played a prostitute's daughter trying to avoid family pressure into following the fate of her mother. Further highlights of this period included ''
Tom, Dick, and Harry'', a 1941 comedy in which she dreams of marrying three different men; ''
I'll Be Seeing You'' (1944), with
Joseph Cotten; and
Billy Wilder's first Hollywood feature film: ''
The Major and the Minor'' (1942), in which she played a woman who masquerades as a 12-year-old to get a cheap train ticket and finds herself obliged to continue the ruse for an extended period. This film featured a performance by Rogers' real mother, Lela, playing her film mother.
After becoming a free agent, Rogers made hugely successful films with other studios in the mid-'40s, including ''
Tender Comrade'' (1943), ''
Lady in the Dark'' (1944), and ''
Week-End at the Waldorf'' (1945), and became the highest-paid performer in Hollywood. However, by the end of the decade, her film career had peaked.
Arthur Freed reunited her with Fred Astaire in ''
The Barkleys of Broadway'' in 1949, when Judy Garland was unable to appear in the role that was to have reunited her with her ''
Easter Parade'' co-star.
1950–1987: Later career
Rogers' film career entered a period of gradual decline in the 1950s, as parts for older actresses became more difficult to obtain, but she still scored with some solid movies. She starred in ''
Storm Warning'' (1950) with
Ronald Reagan and
Doris Day, a noir, anti-
Ku Klux Klan film by Warner Bros. In 1952 Rogers starred in two comedies featuring
Marilyn Monroe, ''
Monkey Business'' with
Cary Grant, directed by
Howard Hawks, and ''
We're Not Married!.'' She followed those with a role in ''
Dreamboat'' alongside
Clifton Webb, as his wife. She played the female lead in ''
Tight Spot'' (1955), a mystery thriller, with
Edward G. Robinson. After a series of unremarkable films, she scored a great popular success on Broadway in 1965, playing Dolly Levi in the long-running ''Hello, Dolly!''

In later life, Rogers remained on good terms with Astaire; she presented him with a special
Academy Award in 1950, and they were copresenters of individual Academy Awards in 1967, during which they elicited a standing ovation when they came on stage in an impromptu dance. In 1969, she had the lead role in another long-running popular production, ''
Mame'', from the book by
Jerome Lawrence and
Robert Edwin Lee, with music and lyrics by
Jerry Herman, at the
Theatre Royal Drury Lane in the
West End of
London, arriving for the role on the liner ''
Queen Elizabeth 2'' from New York City. Her docking there occasioned the maximum of pomp and ceremony at
Southampton. She became the highest-paid performer in the history of the West End up to that time. The production ran for 14 months and featured a royal command performance for
Queen Elizabeth II.
From the 1950s onward, Rogers made occasional appearances on television, even substituting for a vacationing
Hal March on ''
The $64,000 Question''. In the later years of her career, she made guest appearances in three different series by
Aaron Spelling: ''
The Love Boat'' (1979), ''
Glitter'' (1984), and ''
Hotel'' (1987), which was her final screen appearance as an actress. In 1985, Rogers fulfilled a long-standing wish to direct when she directed the musical ''
Babes in Arms'' off-Broadway in
Tarrytown, New York, at 74 years old. It was produced by Michael Lipton and Robert Kennedy of Kennedy Lipton Productions. The production starred Broadway talents Donna Theodore, Carleton Carpenter, James Brennan,
Randy Skinner,
Karen Ziemba, Dwight Edwards, and Kim Morgan. It is also noted in her autobiography ''Ginger, My Story''.
Honors
The
Kennedy Center honored Ginger Rogers in December 1992. This event, which was shown on television, was somewhat marred when Astaire's widow, Robyn Smith, who permitted clips of Astaire dancing with Rogers to be shown for free at the function itself, was unable to come to terms with
CBS Television for broadcast rights to the clips (all previous rights-holders having donated broadcast rights'' gratis'').
For her contributions to the motion picture industry, Rogers has a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6772 Hollywood Boulevard.
Personal life

Rogers, an only child, maintained a close relationship with her mother, Lela Rogers, throughout her life. Lela, a newspaper reporter, scriptwriter, and movie producer, was also one of the first women to enlist in the
Marine Corps, was a founder of the successful "Hollywood Playhouse" for aspiring actors and actresses on the RKO set, and a founder of the
Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Rogers was a lifelong member of the
Republican Party, who campaigned for
Thomas Dewey in the
1944 presidential election and was a strong opponent of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaking out against both him and his
New Deal proposals. She was also a member of The
Daughters of the American Revolution.
Rogers and her mother also had an extremely close professional relationship. Lela Rogers was credited with many pivotal contributions to her daughter's early successes in New York City and in Hollywood, and gave her much assistance in contract negotiations with RKO. She also wrote a children's mystery book with her daughter as the central character.
On March 29, 1929, Rogers married for the first time at age 17 to her dancing partner
Jack Pepper (real name Edward Jackson Culpepper). They divorced in 1931, having separated soon after the wedding. Ginger dated
Mervyn LeRoy in 1932, but they ended the relationship and remained friends until his death in 1987. In 1934, she married actor
Lew Ayres (1908–96). They divorced seven years later.
In 1943, Rogers married her third husband,
Jack Briggs, who was a U.S. Marine. Upon his return from World War II, Briggs showed no interest in continuing his incipient Hollywood career. They divorced in 1949. In 1953, she married
Jacques Bergerac, a French actor 16 years her junior, whom she met on a trip to Paris. A lawyer in France, he came to Hollywood with her and became an actor. They divorced in 1957. Her fifth and final husband was director and producer
William Marshall. They married in 1961 and divorced in 1969, after his bouts with alcohol and the financial collapse of their joint film production company in
Jamaica.

Rogers was lifelong friends with actresses
Lucille Ball and
Bette Davis. She appeared with Ball in an episode of ''
Here's Lucy'' on November 22, 1971, in which Rogers danced the
Charleston for the first time in many years. Rogers starred in one of the earliest films co-directed and co-scripted by a woman,
Wanda Tuchock's ''Finishing School'' (1934). Rogers maintained a close friendship with her cousin, writer/socialite
Phyllis Fraser, wife of
Random House publisher
Bennett Cerf, but was not
Rita Hayworth's natural cousin, as has been reported. Hayworth's maternal uncle,
Vinton Hayworth, was married to Rogers' maternal aunt, Jean Owens.
She was raised a
Christian Scientist and remained a lifelong adherent. She devoted a great deal of time in her autobiography to the importance of her faith throughout her career. Rogers' mother died in 1977. Rogers remained at the 4-Rs (Rogers' Rogue River Ranch) until 1990, when she sold the property and moved to nearby
Medford, Oregon.
The City of Independence, Missouri, designated the birthplace of Ginger Rogers a Historic Landmark Property in 1994. On July 16, 1994, Ginger and her secretary, Roberta Olden, visited Independence, Missouri to appear at the Ginger Rogers' Day celebration presented by the city. Ginger was present when Mayor Ron Stewart affixed a Historic Landmark Property plaque to the front of the house where she was born on July 16, 1911. She signed over 2,000 autographs at this event. This was one of her last public appearances.
The home was purchased in 2016 by Three Trails Cottages and restored, then transformed into a museum dedicated to Lela Owens-Rogers and Ginger Rogers. It contains memorabilia, magazines, movie posters, and many items from Ginger's ranch that Lela and Ginger owned. Several gowns that Ginger Rogers wore are on display. The museum was open seasonally from April - September, and several special events are held on the site each year. It closed in August 2019.
Ginger Rogers made her last public appearance on 18 March 1995, when she received the Women's International Center (WIC) Living Legacy Award. For many years, Rogers regularly supported, and held in-person presentations, at the
Craterian Theater, in Medford, where she had performed in 1926 as a vaudevillian. The theater was comprehensively restored in 1997 and posthumously renamed in her honor as the Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater.
Death

Rogers spent winters in
Rancho Mirage and summers in Medford, Oregon. She died at her Rancho Mirage home on April 25, 1995, from natural causes at the age of 83.
She was cremated and her ashes interred with her mother
Lela Emogene in
Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in
Chatsworth, California.
Legacy
* Likenesses of Astaire and Rogers, apparently painted over from the "Cheek to Cheek" dance in ''Top Hat'', are in the "
Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" section of
The Beatles film ''
Yellow Submarine'' (1968).
* Rogers' image is one of many famous women's images of the 1930s and '40s featured on the bedroom wall in the
Anne Frank House in
Amsterdam, a gallery of magazine cuttings pasted on the wall created by
Anne and her sister
Margot while hiding from the
Nazis. When the house became a museum, the gallery the Frank sisters created was preserved under glass.
* ''Ginger The Musical'' by Robert Kennedy and Paul Becker which Ginger Rogers approved and was to direct on Broadway the year of her death was in negotiations as late as the 2016–17 Broadway season. Marshall Mason directed its first production in 2001 starring Donna McKechnie and Nili Bassman and was choreographed by Randy Skinner.
* A
musical about the life of Rogers, entitled ''Backwards in High Heels'', premiered in Florida in early 2007.
* Rogers was the heroine of a novel, ''Ginger Rogers and the Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak'' (1942, by Lela E. Rogers), in which "the heroine has the same name and appearance as the famous actress, but has no connection ... it is as though the famous actress has stepped into an alternate reality in which she is an ordinary person." It is part of a series known as "Whitman Authorized Editions", 16 books published between 1941 and 1947 that featured a film actress as heroine.
* The
Dancing House in
Prague (Czech: ''Tančící dům''), sometimes known as Ginger and Fred, was designed by American architect
Frank Gehry and inspired by the dancing of Astaire and Rogers.
* In the 1981 film ''
Pennies From Heaven'',
Bernadette Peters's character dances with
Steve Martin's as they watch Fred and Ginger's "Let's Face the Music and Dance" sequence from 1936's ''Follow the Fleet'', using it as their inspiration.
*
Federico Fellini's film ''
Ginger and Fred'' centers on two aging Italian impersonators of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Rogers sued the production and the distributor when the film was released in the U.S. for misappropriation and infringement of her public personality. Her claims were dismissed, as according to the judgment, the film only obliquely related to Astaire and her.
* Rogers was among the sixteen Golden Age Hollywood stars referenced in the bridge of
Madonna's 1990 single
Vogue (Madonna song).
Filmography
See also
*
List of actors with Academy Award nominations
References
Bibliography
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External links
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Ginger Rogers – AppreciationsBackwards in High Heels: The Ginger Musical*
ttp://www.virtual-history.com/movie/person/1255/ginger-rogers Photographs and literaturebr>
Owens-Rogers Museum in Independence, Missouri
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