Michael Kidd was an American film and stage choreographer, dancer and actor, whose career spanned five decades, and staged some of the leading Broadway and film musicals of the 1940s and 1950s.
40 Facts About Michael Kidd
2.
Michael Kidd was probably best known for his athletic dance numbers in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a 1954 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical.
3.
Michael Kidd was the first choreographer to win five Tony Awards, and was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1996 for advancing dance in film.
4.
Michael Kidd was born Milton Greenwald, in New York City on the Lower East Side, the son of Abraham Greenwald, a barber, and his wife Lillian, who were Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia.
5.
Michael Kidd moved to Brooklyn with his family and attended New Utrecht High School.
6.
Michael Kidd became interested in dance after attending a modern dance performance, and went on to study under Blanche Evan, a dancer and choreographer.
7.
Michael Kidd studied chemical engineering at the City College of New York in 1936 and 1937, but left after being granted a scholarship to the School of American Ballet.
8.
Michael Kidd toured the country as a member of the corps de ballet of Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan, and performed in roles that included the lead in Billy the Kid, choreographed by Eugene Loring, which featured an orchestral arrangement by Aaron Copland.
9.
Michael Kidd chose Kidd because it was short, easy to remember, and evocative of the pirate Captain Kidd.
10.
In 1941, Michael Kidd became a soloist and assistant to Loring in his Dance Players.
11.
Michael Kidd became a soloist for Ballet Theater, later known as the American Ballet Theatre.
12.
Michael Kidd was hired to stage the film's dances at Astaire's request because he was nervous about the ballet.
13.
Michael Kidd said that he made Astaire comfortable by pretending that he was just making up the steps spontaneously.
14.
For example, Michael Kidd explained to Mercer and dePaul his conception of the "Lonesome Polecat" number, the lament of the brothers for the women, and the two worked out the music and lyrics.
15.
Michael Kidd made his movie acting debut in It's Always Fair Weather, directed by Gene Kelly and Donen, in which Kelly, Kidd and Dan Dailey played three ex-GIs meeting 10 years after the war, only to discover they had little in common.
16.
Kelly rejected this, which Michael Kidd took as a personal insult, and Donen went further, ending his collaboration with Kelly for the rest of their lives.
17.
Michael Kidd was both director and choreographer for the musical comedy film Merry Andrew, starring Danny Kaye.
18.
Michael Kidd won another Tony Award for his choreography, which was adapted for the film version in 1959.
19.
Michael Kidd choreographed the famous Broadway flop Breakfast at Tiffany's, a musical version of the Truman Capote novella with Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain that never officially opened.
20.
The film was not a success as a musical, with Kelly and Michael Kidd making little use of the widescreen format of the film.
21.
Michael Kidd went on to direct and choreograph the 1970 Broadway musical The Rothschilds, starring Hal Linden, and directed The Goodbye Girl, with Bernadette Peters and Martin Short, a 1993 adaptation of the 1977 Neil Simon film that was his final Broadway play.
22.
Michael Kidd appeared in supporting roles as a character actor in the 1970s and 1980s, beginning with his performance as the faded, cynical choreographer for a cheesy beauty pageant in the satirical 1975 film Smile.
23.
Michael Kidd acted in and staged the musical sequences in the 1978 film Movie Movie, which was directed by Stanley Donen, with whom he'd worked in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and It's Always Fair Weather.
24.
Michael Kidd directed an episode of the TV comedy Laverne and Shirley as well as scenes for Janet Jackson in two music videos: "When I Think of You" and "Alright".
25.
Michael Kidd conceived and choreographed the television special Baryshnikov in Hollywood, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1982, for which he was nominated for an Emmy Award.
26.
Michael Kidd died of cancer at the age 92 at his home in Los Angeles, California.
27.
Michael Kidd was the uncle of filmmaker and political activist Robert Greenwald.
28.
Michael Kidd's older brother was Harold Greenwald, a prominent psychotherapist and best-selling author of the 1958 book The Call Girl, who was an expert in the study of prostitution.
29.
Michael Kidd was unusually well-respected, and his judgment was granted deference by the leading dancers of his era.
30.
British critic and biographer Michael Freedland said at the time of his death that "when Gene Kelly danced through the street with a dustbin lid tied to his feet in the 1955 film It's Always Fair Weather, the man who usually planned his own routines did it to Kidd's order".
31.
Michael Kidd believed that dance needed to derive from life, saying that his "dancing is based on naturalistic movement that is abstracted and enlarged", and that "all my movements relate to some kind of real activity".
32.
Michael Kidd always wanted dance to serve the story, and when beginning a new work he would write a scenario, explaining how the plot drove the characters to dance.
33.
Michael Kidd put the story first, communicating it through dance.
34.
Michael Kidd staged a comedic ballet sequence for the 1954 Danny Kaye film Knock on Wood, in which Kaye is chased into a theater and hides on stage during a performance by a Russian ballet company.
35.
One history of the musical theater observes that "Michael Kidd forged dances, and shows, in which men were men, leaping high, stout hearted, and passionate about their dolls".
36.
Michael Kidd choreographed "for the little guy, the working guy, the guy defined by his job and the movement that job entailed".
37.
Rather than insisting she turn to the right, as many choreographers would do, Michael Kidd "found that fascinating, and he made all the other dancers turn to the left".
38.
Michael Kidd was the first choreographer to win five Tony Awards, and received nine Tony nominations.
39.
Michael Kidd was awarded an Academy Honorary Award in 1997 "in recognition of his services to the art of dance in the art of the screen".
40.
Michael Kidd was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981.