Ginger Rogers won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her starring role in Kitty Foyle, and performed during the 1930s in RKO's musical films with Fred Astaire.
52 Facts About Ginger Rogers
2.
Ginger Rogers's career continued on stage, radio and television throughout much of the 20th century.
3.
Ginger Rogers had her first successful film roles as a supporting actress in 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933.
4.
Ginger Rogers's acting was well received by critics and audiences in films such as Stage Door, Vivacious Lady, Bachelor Mother, Primrose Path, The Major and the Minor and I'll Be Seeing You.
5.
Ginger Rogers's popularity was peaking by the end of the decade.
6.
Ginger Rogers reunited with Astaire in 1949 in the commercially successful The Barkleys of Broadway.
7.
Ginger Rogers continued to act, making television appearances until 1987, and wrote an autobiography Ginger: My Story which was published in 1991.
8.
In 1992, Ginger Rogers was recognized at the Kennedy Center Honors.
9.
Ginger Rogers died of natural causes in 1995, at age 83.
10.
Ginger Rogers's mother gave birth to Ginger at home, having lost a previous child in a hospital.
11.
Ginger Rogers said that she never saw her natural father again.
12.
In 1915, Ginger Rogers was left 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.
13.
When Ginger Rogers was nine years old, her mother married John Logan Ginger Rogers.
14.
Ginger Rogers's mother became a theater critic for a local newspaper, the Fort Worth Record.
15.
Ginger Rogers then made a significant breakthrough as Anytime Annie in the Warner Bros.
16.
Ginger Rogers went on to make a series of films at Warner Bros.
17.
Ginger Rogers 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 stolen by Rogers and Broadway star Fred Astaire.
18.
Arlene Croce, Hermes Pan, Hannah Hyam, and John Mueller all consider Ginger 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.
19.
Ginger Rogers was 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.
20.
Ginger Rogers fought hard for her contract and salary rights and for better films and scripts.
21.
In 1934, Ginger Rogers sued Sylvia of Hollywood for $100K for defamation.
22.
The fitness guru and radio personality had claimed that Ginger Rogers was on her radio show when, in fact, she was not.
23.
On March 5,1939, Ginger Rogers starred in "Single Party Going East", an episode of Silver Theater on CBS radio.
24.
In 1941 Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in 1940's Kitty Foyle.
25.
Ginger Rogers enjoyed considerable success during the early 1940s, and was RKO's hottest property during this period.
26.
In Roxie Hart, based on the same play which later served as the template for the musical Chicago, Ginger Rogers played a wisecracking flapper in a love triangle on trial for the murder of her lover; set in the era of prohibition.
27.
Ginger Rogers starred in Storm Warning with Ronald Reagan and Doris Day, a noir, anti-Ku Klux Klan film by Warner Bros.
28.
Ginger Rogers followed those with a role in Dreamboat alongside Clifton Webb, as his wife.
29.
Ginger Rogers played the female lead in Tight Spot, a mystery thriller, with Edward G Robinson.
30.
In later life, Ginger 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.
31.
Ginger Rogers became the highest-paid performer in the history of the West End up to that time.
32.
In 1985, Ginger 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.
33.
Ginger Rogers was a lifelong member of the Republican Party, who campaigned for Thomas Dewey in the 1944 presidential election, Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election and Ronald Reagan in the 1966 California gubernatorial election.
34.
Ginger Rogers was a strong opponent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, speaking out against both him and his New Deal proposals.
35.
Ginger Rogers was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
36.
Lela Ginger Rogers was credited with 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.
37.
Ginger Rogers wrote a children's mystery book with her daughter as the central character.
38.
On March 29,1929, Ginger Rogers married for the first time at age 17 to her dancing partner Jack Pepper.
39.
Ginger Rogers dated Mervyn LeRoy in 1932, but they ended the relationship and remained friends until his death in 1987.
40.
In 1943, Ginger Rogers married her third husband, Jack Briggs, who was a US Marine.
41.
Ginger Rogers was lifelong friends with actresses Lucille Ball and Bette Davis.
42.
Ginger Rogers 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.
43.
Ginger Rogers starred in one of the earliest films co-directed and co-scripted by a woman, Wanda Tuchock's Finishing School.
44.
Ginger Rogers was raised a Christian Scientist and remained a lifelong adherent, a topic she discussed at length in her autobiography.
45.
Ginger Rogers was a talented tennis player, and entered the 1950 US Open.
46.
Ginger Rogers 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.
47.
Ginger Rogers signed over 2,000 autographs at this event, which was one of her last public appearances.
48.
Ginger Rogers made her last public appearance on March 18,1995, when she received the Women's International Center Living Legacy Award.
49.
For many years, Ginger Rogers regularly supported, and held in-person presentations, at the Craterian Theater, in Medford, where she had performed in 1926 as a vaudevillian.
50.
Ginger Rogers spent winters in Rancho Mirage and summers in Medford, Oregon.
51.
Ginger Rogers died at her Rancho Mirage home on April 25,1995, from a heart attack.
52.
Ginger Rogers was cremated and her ashes interred with her mother Lela Emogene in Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California.