Gene Kelly, Creative Genius
A personal celebration of his life and work
"..A new step every day.."
Dancing is an art that influences the soul (Plato)
Gene, magazine article 1958
As I look back on my career, I can heartily subscribe to Plato’s deduction that dancing is an art that influences the soul. It has been the open-sesame to me of a most satisfying life, with ever-extending borders. If one has the talent, has the heart to work hard, I would be the first to say ‘Go to it’.
St Petersburg Times. August 4th 1984
“I wanted to take off my shirt and get comfortable,” Kelly says, with a typically Irish grin. "I thought it was possible to have ordinary people dance and sing. It was a good break to put on Army and Navy uniforms…It worked for me"…
…What Kelly made up entranced audiences around the world. He created a kinetic, unabashed and breezy and breathtakingly acrobatic dance style that was ruthlessly efficient in its use of the screen.
“I cared about dance,” Kelly said simply. “My whole premise was to be well-rehearsed. If I played a truck driver, which is the kind of role I got, I had to move like a truck driver. But are truck drivers graceful? That was my entire credo – I had to dance the characters.”
Screen Album. Summer 1952
Betsy: He never stops thinking about dance. Even when he’s shaving. It used to startle me when I’d suddenly hear something that sounded as though the whole medicine chest had crashed to the floor and then Gene would emerge triumphant with a brand new choreography and his face half lathered.
Movie Teen. October 1947
The inexhaustible imagination and originality which Gene brings to his dancing…will keep him always unique among the dance-man stars.
Light as a breeze and graceful as a falling leaf, Gene has danced his way to the top,
Film Buff. February1976. Barbara Wolf. The Art Of Gene Kelly.
Kelly found [For Me & My Gal] painful to see, for his dancing seemed without vitality. The realisation that dance created for the stage was wrong for film started him pondering the whole question of the contrasts between the two and three dimensional space. He became an avid film student and began to experiment, to test the effects of different kinds of movement on the viewer. He gradually developed a staff to assist him, most notably Stanley Donen…whose originality of mind had greatly impressed Kelly; and Jeannie Coyne, his prize pupil back in Pittsburgh from her childhood…Kelly, with their help, gradually evolved an aesthetic of screen dancing based on the unique suitability of film for stylisation and fantasy…Cover Girl elated him, and when the public accepted it too, he discovered in himself a passion to subdue film to his choreographic ideas…
When he returned from the service in 1946, he had become a man in a hurry. He had lost many dancing years to his late start and now more time to the war. He looked far younger than his 34 years and was as tireless as ever. But the fulfilment of his new ambition, to direct, choreograph and perform in the extremely strenuous works he now had in mind, depended on a level of stamina and physical finetuning which a dancer of his age could not realistically expect to maintain for long.
Luckily, Arthur Freed…sympathised entirely and worked closely with Kelly to develop promising material…
He went about educating his public, as he had once taught his students, one thing at a time. In Words and Music, he performed a sombre jazz ballet…Public and critics liked it. Next, Take Me Out To The Ball Game, featured a baseball ballet combining classical technique with comedic acrobatics. When the public accepted that too, Kelly felt his thesis was established: he had brought screen dancing out of its isolation and gotten it accepted as story-telling and characterization as well as pure form...
Dancing seems always to have been the key factor in Kelly’s career. His scramble after singing, diction and acting lessons, when he learned he was being considered for Pal Joey, indicates that he had never seriously anticipated needing those skills. His crash-course in self-education about film suggests a similar lack of previous concern. The mastery he soon acquired of those arts was devoted mainly to the enhancements of his dances. Without that purpose, the use of those skills did not arouse quite the passion needed for a completely successful artistic career.
His late start indicates that either some interior check was holding him back, or that fame as such was far less compelling to him than to most performers. And after the passing of the musical era, while other former stars kept themselves before the public at any cost, on TV game shows or commercials or before inattentive night club audiences, Kelly kept remarkably aloof. It seems plain that, at his height, he had labored so hard primarily for his joy in the work itself, to create and record his dances. The range of his abilities seemed such that he could have gone on from dancing to other triumphs, but apparently the only instrument to inspire him sufficiently was his own body. Fortunately the great age of the dance musical, so much his own creation, lasted just long enough for Kelly to make his record of that extraordinary instrument in use, at the height of his powers, projecting that appearance of blissful ease which is the mark of all true art performed for its own sake.
Evening Independent. March 20th 1942
Gene Kelly, New York stage star who will appear with Judy Garland in The Big Time, recently received three trunks full of shoes, nearly two hundred pairs in all. They are the dancing shoes Kelly has worn during his career. The dancer has bought new shoes continually, ‘broken them in’ and saved them from his shows. Thus he can find a shoe of any type or color already limbered up for dancing. With the exception of Eleanor Powell, he probably owns the largest collection of show shoes in Hollywood.
On the opening of the Johnstown school:
Not only was he giving lessons in tap dancing, which they all wanted at first, but he took a shot at ballet. Just why he
wasn’t garrotted when he first started that is not immediately apparent, but in no time at all he had pupils from coal-mining towns like Portage and Lilly leaping gaily through the air like Nijinsky.
Dallas Times Herald. June 1974
In a certain way Kelly did for dance at that time what Elvis Presley was to do later for popular music. Kelly fused together a number of diverse styles that exploded in a bold new manner. He drew upon the whimsy of tap, the showmanship of the eccentric dancer, the free form of Martha Graham, his own skills as a gymnast and organized all of it with legitimate classical disciplines. The bristling package of rhythm and style hit the dance world with a fallout that is still being felt.
Photoplay Peter Hammond, October 1953
“It goes like this,” said Gene Kelly as he tapped a few steps across the floor.
I had asked him a question about the dance sequences in his film Invitation To The Dance which he’s just completed.
“It’s easy, try it,” said Gene with a broad grin, “one foot across the other, twist and…”
His face glowed with enthusiasm at the mention of dancing and his feet tapped.
That is the sort of thing you have to expect when you talk to Kelly. For dancing is his natural means of expression
Chicago Tribune. September 23rd 1945
You may have thought that brawn and dancing ability don’t mix, but take a gander at Gene Kelly – he’s strictly on the rugged side….
Evening Independent. March 13th 1947
Yep, Spring is just around everybody’s corner, and Gene Kelly says you’d better get in shape for it. Get rid of that paunch, admonishes the dancing master, and he’s got just the formula for it. Instead of the usual pre-breakfast push-ups and knee-bends, Gene advises us to pirouette before prunes, tap before toast. He says a fast ten-minute dance routine, including some high kicks and a few twirls, will do wonders toward flattening your stomach. “And think of the fun you’ll have.”
St.Petersburg Times. October 16th 1947. Louella Parsons.
It’s difficult to believe that Gene Kelly’s leg is so badly broken he may never dance again. It is the third break in the same leg, and his doctor is not very encouraging. Not since Fred Astaire has there been a dancer with Gene’s grace and ability and personality. Easter Parade will be held up for six weeks and then if he can’t dance at that time, it will probably go into production with another dancer.
Evening Independent. January 18th 1947
Gene Kelly tore two ligaments in his dance fall and will be on crutches for a while.
Deseret News. September 20th 1947
Hardest working people in Hollywood…are the dancing stars, like…Gene Kelly. This correspondent ran into him the other 
day as he was leaving the studio after a hard day’s rehearsal for his final routine in The Pirate. “You really have to work hard, don’t you,” I said. “Sometimes I wonder,” Gene answered, “why I didn’t become a bus driver.”
Screen Guide July 1948
Acrobatics remain just stunts for some dancers. Kelly makes them part of the rhythmic pattern.
Screen Album 1944
From the neck up, Gene Kelly’s a plain-faced [!!!!!!!] joe with the rasp of Broadway in every light-voiced syllable. Below the tie-line he’s quicksilver muscle always an inch or two above solid ground. Put it on paper and the words drag like your feet and mine. You’ve got to see the fluid magic of that spirit dance in Cover Girl, the way he whirls Kerry over the living room rug, the controlled dancer’s grace of little gestures like climbing a stair-flight or leaning against a wall. When Pal Joey first came to Hollywood, they anchored his feet in straight drama. Christmas Holiday was the ultimate sin. A guy like Gene couldn’t kill a fly convincingly. Give him a dance floor and skip the tragedy. Let the body act for him, Hollywood…There are a million better-looking profiles [sorry to repeat myself, but !!!!!!! Is this writer visually challenged???] banging on Central Casting doors, but they say you gotta rub a lamp to get a Genie!
Seventeen magazine. September 1946
If you saw Gene walking down Main Street you would not be likely to say, “There goes a dancer.” He has a compact, purposeful walk with long, vigorous strides. You might think him a cop – genial and tough, with Ireland in his grin. But start him talking about the dance and he soon illustrates remarks with a tap or a gesture that leaves no doubt - here’s a dancer….
TV &Movie Screen. August 1975
When the name of gene Kelly is mentioned, you don’t get a vision of a serious dramatic actor. One’s immediate image is
that of a wondrous performer out on the floor doing amazing, acrobatic things, or some highly innovative ones such as his classic Singin’ In The Rain number which will live as long as film does.
What was the Kelly secret? “There was no secret, I’ve always thought that dancing should be a joy, and should bring happiness and laughter. I always tried just to do that.”
Silver Screen. April 1947
Since his mind is as nimble as his feet, Gene finds inspiration for his choreography in the oddest places…and he never stops looking. Buster Keaton…stopped at the lunch table to chat with Gene.
“Buster, I still remember some of your comedies I saw when I was a kid in Pittsburgh. They had a lot of freshness and novelty that we’ve forgotten today,” Gene told him. “Do you suppose I could run some of them some day? I might find some ideas in them.”
Keaton assured Kelly he’s be glad to have some of them screened. There were no dances in them, mind you, but Gene never finds ideas for his routines in other dances.
Motion Picture May 1954
Kelly has no great taste for dancing, ballroom variety, in public, and when he does venture onto the floor, he is sedate and unimaginative. He does, on the other hand, caper considerably while walking or waiting for elevators, and now and then a real solid choreographic lick is worked out in someone’s ante room.
New York Times. 2nd March 1941
By the time he graduated from Pitt the school had earned a large enough surplus to finance him through a summer of work on his own dancing. “I went to Chicago, found a good teacher, and in my spare time read every book on the ballet that they had in the Chicago Public Library. Yeah, I even read the ones that were in French, and that was strictly labor because me French is just school French.”
When the Chicago teacher had advanced him in his art he came to New York, found another teacher and more books, then went back to Chicago for another polishing.
“For a while I thought that all I wanted to do was teach dancing. But before long I had done everything that I could do in my line in Pittsburgh, and I couldn’t see a life that was just more of the same.”
He came to New York and shortly caught attention as the out-of-work dancer in William Saroyan’s The Time Of Your Life.
Modern Screen. August 1944
When he was dancing on Broadway and even before in his home town, Pittsburgh, his mind was ticking off dreams of things he’d like to do some day on the screen with its swell possibilities for trick effects. Gene shoots at the moon in his dreams, and for his money the highest type of dancing is to express an inner struggle by active rhythm. All great ballet dancers, Nijinsky and all the rest, have put across a mental or spiritual theme when they tied into the pinnacles of their art. It isn’t easy, even on a stage where there’s a flesh-and-blood contact between a performer and his audience. It had never been done on the screen, but Gene Kelly didn’t see why not, being a Kelly.
Screen Guide July 1947
Kelly is a serious student of his art. He has read a wide variety of books on the dance and originates his own routines. He also directs them since there is no man in Hollywood more qualified to do so…According to dance critics, Gene’s foremost attribute is his imagination. He can dream up ideas which, expressed in terms of the dance, hold great insight and entertainment value.
Silver Screen June 1954
The most remarkable thing about Gene is his out-and-out determination to do everything perfectly. He is a tireless taskmaster, and yet he never overworks his co-star. If he sees a girl is getting tired he will stop rehearsing and go into another phase of the production. But he drives himself mercilessly.
He has two dance assistants – Carole Haney and Jeanne Coyne. He talks over the ideas for dances in his office with them and then they work out the steps. Sometimes one of the girls will act as his partner, another time she will be part of a chorus. When the routine is in good shape he’ll start working with his co-starring actress. He shows her what he has in mind – and then the rehearsals begin. Usually they’ll rehearse five or six weeks before the picture begins, averaging about a week to each number.
In addition to doing all the choreography for his dances he originates the routines for his partner’s dances – and spends as much, if not more, time on her numbers as he does on his own…He is a man of inexhaustible talents.
Modern Screen July 1947
His touch in all the art forms connected with dancing is deft, and as a choreographer, he is little short of a genius. Unlike
other artists, he doesn’t have a studio or a canvas or a piano; his office is in his head, and he spends silent hours working out his dances in introspect. Once in a while he does use mirrors to get the effect of line…Sometimes the steps he designs are divine when viewed head-on; and then the director will decide to shoot a portion of the scene from overhead or along a line of legs; whereupon, Gene will have to revise them. To the tune of hours’ more work.
Incredibly, dancing and all its difficult ramifications are for Gene the sheerest fun. There’s an exhilaration to his work that can’t be put into words, that only another dancer could understand. In addition to this exhilaration, he feels that dancing gives a person a certain animal grace which is a great social asset if, says gene, you care about social assets. He stresses the importance of avoiding overtraining….Not that some training isn’t advisable. Gene does a great deal of swimming, which is excellent for dancing, and very little walking, which slows you down because you land on your heels, pulling the back leg muscles. He eats more or less what he wants, but has stopped smoking since his discharge from the Navy
Theatre Arts 1945
Creating and performing film dances is the place where Gene Kelly shines brightest. This involves no narrow range of activities, however. For screen dance as he sees it entails much more than the unadorned procedure of adding gestures together in front of a camera. It requires a knowledge of the workings and limitations of the camera itself; a musical comprehension that can speak to composers in terms of rhythm and instrumentation and melodic line; a dramatic sense that can conceive and lay out the motivation for a dance so that it does not appear – as screen dances do all too frequently – like some irrelevant appliqué on the pattern of the story.
Saturday Evening Post 1980
"The style of dancing I did originated with me. It's my own. I hadn't seen it before and I haven't seen it since. Now that doesn't mean that everybody prefers my style of dance, which is wide open bravura, or that it's the best. But no one, at least, can say that it isn't my own creation. Whether it's good or bad is not for me to say. But it's mine. No one can ever take it away from me."
And no one would try. That style, that verve, that originality - they're all part of the Kelly magic.
John Updike. New Yorker 1994
He had plenty of ginger but no Ginger…we think of Gene Kelly as a guy in loafers and a tight T-shirt tap-dancing up a storm all by his lonesome. His torso and his profile were beautiful…
New York Times 11th February 1996. Anna Kisselgoff.
Gene Kelly was not a hoofer. His genius as a dancer, for all its common-man bravura, borrowed from more than a single tradition. His view of dance was ecumenical, making impossible any narrow definition of his own gifts as performer, choreographer and director...
No one needs to be told that Kelly was a terrific dancer. Yet typically even the solo which he performed to the title song of the 1952 film Singin' In The Rain, was more than what it seemed. Amid all the vernacular touches - loping, leaping, flat-footed splashing - and creative tapping, Kelly found time to spring sideways in the ballet steps known as pas de chat....His ballet training was as important to him as his tap lessons....He could also use ballet in disguise. In the 1945 Anchors Aweigh, he executed turns a la seconde with Jerry, the animated mouse, perched on his extended leg...
What was striking about Kelly was that he never lost touch with the dance world at large and followed its trends closely...
At one time, Kelly claimed he wanted to come across as a truck driver. As such, he persuaded us that even truck drivers could dance.
Picturegoer August 1953
At last it's happened. I've actually met the screen player who believes in 3-D.
From Gene Kelly I got the impression that perhaps after all the extra film dimension may become the crafts men's delight
as well as the exhibitor's darling..
Muffled and sweating in a seaman's pullover, for Crest Of The Wave, Kelly rolled a tissue handkerchief into balls and enthused.
“It's what I've been waiting for. From my point of view it will give the screen what it has always lacked, the depth, the illusion of live dancing on the stage. It will bring the ballet closer to the public.
“Ballet on the screen has always been a poor substitute for ballet on the stage. It has to be.”
Surprising? Surely Kelly, who has done more than any man to raise the level of the film musical, would agree that the screen gives something of its own to the dance?
“No. Not a thing.
“Eventually though, I want to make a full-length story told only in mime and ballet. At the studio they say, 'Why do you want to make a dance film without words? You're crazy.'”
Liberty magazine. September 1948
People started calling Gene The Feet after he appeared on a Bob Hope broadcast. “And now, ladies and gentlemen”, announced Hope, “you have heard of The Voice, The Body, and The Nose. Tonight we have as our guest The Feet – the Gregory Peck of the dancing shoes.”
Marian Horosko, dancer in An American In Paris. The Making Of An American In Paris. DVD 2008
Kelly was enthusiastic and fun, and he looked as if he could hardly wait to get out there and dance, and he had this wonderful grin. We wanted to be part of what he saw and what he wanted.
Interview Magazine 1994
In most of his films he played the hyperathletic sexual initiator of partners like Judy Garland, Vera-Ellen, Debbie 
Reynolds, or Leslie Caron. That his American In Paris character was essentially priapic is revealed amid the dreamy Impressionist artifice of the Moulin Rouge ballet, in which Kelly dances in a skin-tight bodysuit before the splayed skirts of the cancan girls
Saturday Evening Post. July 1950
Back home in Pittsburgh, in addition to his studio work, he was beginning to take private pupils and to stage a few University of Pittsburgh Cap and Gown shows, as well as some for the Junior League. He had a burning desire to put on better shows than the leaguers had previously produced. The leaguers had been settling for a ‘heel and toe and away we go’ sort of thing. Their dancing teachers had made them perspire delicately. Gene made them sweat...
The Gene Kelly of today is a long holler from the young dancing master of the same name who attended the sessions of the Chicago National Association of Dancing Masters back in 1933.
With his brother Fred, they had gone West with barely enough ready scratch in their pockets to stake them for two weeks. But when the C.N.A.D.M. instructors showed them how to do Nijinsky-like things with their feet, legs and bodies – things they hadn’t known could be done – it so fevered them with excitement that they stretched their stay longer…they kept themselves more or less solvent by patching together a baggy-pants-and-putty-nose type song-dance-and-comedy routine and booking themselves into a series of flea-bag bistros.
Time Magazine. August 1967
Kelly deplores the common U.S. image of the dancer as a mincing she-man. When he first began dancing in nightclubs in the Pittsburgh area, ringside drunks would snigger “Hello, honey.” One night he slugged one of the loudmouths and hotfooted it to Manhattan.
Time Magazine March 2002
A viewer’s eyes always go to Kelly’s body…Like so many middle-class guys, he was an athlete and a salesman. His work was his cheeriest, most seductive pitch for his idea of dance and, of course, for himself... And because his muscular masculinity was a crucial component of his appeal, Kelly blew away the perfume of sissy-hood that clung to serious dance like a too-tight tutu.
Bob Hope
He’s the Gregory Peck of the dancing shoes... When Gene Kelly dances, Fred Astaire counts his money
New York Times 1979
Mr Kelly learned to choreograph his musical numbers to be cut and edited without disturbing his audience’s sense of motion and involvement. He structured his dances so the movement came towards the camera, to give them kinetic physical force. By placing vertical props on the stage for panning shots, he could increase the feeling of movement. Most of all though, he tried to find ways of expressing character and resolving thematic or plot issues within his dances.
American Film Institute Booklet 1985
As a choreographer Kelly was a true cinematic innovator. From the beginning of his career he wanted to do more than just dance. He wanted to create dance numbers in which the dancer did with his body what the actor did with words. He strove to devise a cinematic language of dance which replaced dialogue and even lyrics and told the audience what the character felt, thought, was.
Jeanine Basinger
Once you’ve seen Kelly dance you know what falling in love looks like, sounds like, feels like. He makes it so real you can taste it. Because he could never settle for anything but the best...Gene Kelly achieved the impossible...he never thought
about being famous - he thought about dance on film.
Saturday Evening Post July 1950
Kelly’s stamina is well nigh limitless. A ferocious worker, he polishes his dance routines with rehearsals that last for five or six hours at a stretch and leave his pianists begging for mercy. He warms up for these practice marathons by doing sixty push-ups in sixty seconds or by lying prone and lifting himself from the floor, using only his toes and his finger tips as elevators.
Brad Lang. www.classicmovies.org
Probably the most profound thing you can say about Gene Kelly is that he did for dancing what Bill Gates did for being a computer geek; he made it cool. As somebody else has said, he was the Bruce Springsteen of tap dancers. Unlike Astaire, perhaps his only peer, he didn't dance in top hats and tails on polished floors. He wore chinos and polo shirts and white socks with loafers. He was a guy. As somebody who once took tap-dancing lessons, I owe him a personal debt of gratitude!
Kelly was a swaggeringly virile dancer of incomparable grace and charm. He pushed the boundaries of film dancing beyond the established limits…
Howard Gotlieb, Gene Kelly archivist
His style was extraordinarily masculine, the masculine sexuality coming through his dancing. He was in total command of the stage and you knew that he knew what he was doing.
Ann Miller
He made boy dancers look very sexy and macho….Gene always looked to me like a baseball player that condescended to tap.
Everything he did was very earthy, very sexy, and he’d spring up like a panther, like a tiger. There was something about him that was animalistic.
He was a temperamental man, in a nice way, he wasn’t ugly with it, but he knew what he wanted and he wouldn’t settle for anything less.
Biography Channel
Men were won over by the muscular style of his dancing, women were won over by his sex appeal.
John Corry, New York Times 1981
There are people who say Mr. Kelly was the greatest American-born dancer of all. There is also George Balanchine, who says that Fred Astaire was, and a small but impassioned group of eccentrics who go to the mat for James Cagney. Mr. Astaire was graceful; Mr. Cagney was jaunty; Mr. Kelly was both of those, and virile, breezy and bravura, too.
“Every so often, someone says, ‘Mr. Kelly, don’t you miss dancing?’ I say no, I don’t miss it a bit, If I were still dancing, I wouldn’t be nearly as relaxed as I am now.”
In an interview to the Los Angeles Times in 1994, Kelly talked about his affinity for his leading ladies. "You must make the lady look good," he said. "If she looks good I think the dance will look good".
Betsy Blair:
A sailor suit or his white socks and loafers, or the T-shirts on his muscular torso, gave everyone the feeling that he was a regular guy, and perhaps they too could express love and joy by dancing down the street or stepping through puddles…he democratised the dance in movies.
New York Times April 17th 1994. Hal Rubenstein
He didn't like tapping in white tie and tails, preferring a soft, beat-up fedora to a top-hat, and few Bakelite floors ever
saw his scuff marks. Instead, Gene Kelly danced atop a flatbed truck, in a rain-soaked gutter, up a stepladder, down a hillside, on roller-skates and everywher ein Paris you wished you'd been kissed.
MGM provided him with beautiful partners...But he was just as happy being paired with brooms, curtains, umbrellas, newspapers, baseball bats, kids and rodents. His buoyant athleticism, naive passion and look-ma-I'm-hoofing brand of enthusiasm introduced cinematic dance to sweat, lust and eathly delights. Gene Kelly made everyone believe he could dance, and Everywoman wish that he would. What did Kelly have up his sleeve to inspire such leaps of faith? Actually it was his sleeve - usually rolled up past the elbow. Dazzling as the footwork was, Kelly was equally adept at not looking or dressing like a dancer...and because he always looked so comfortable without ever seeming out of place, he gave bare-armed masculinity both elegance and grace.
So, when it wasn't a costume picture, and he wasn't in uniform - "The Navy made the best dance costume ever," he says. "The proportions, the fit were perfect" - Kelly sought "unfussy shapes that didn't get in the way or break up the line of the body," like gabardine pants, knit vests and full-cut shirts with spread collars. (The latter resulted in Kelly's collaborating with the MGM wardrobe department on V-neck T-shirts, as well as a body shirt to keep his tails from flying out when he lifted his co-stars.)...
Not surprisingly, many of Kelly's most enduring trademarks - loafers with white socks, V-neck sweaters tucked into double-pleated pants, the sack suit and loppy hat - came from his own closet.
"They're what I've always favored," he says in recalling what he wore in Singin' In The Rain, An American In Paris and Cover Girl.
"White socks are clean and they focus the eye on the feet. Moccasins are cut to show the white socks. You tuck a sweater in so you can see the body move. Astaire and I always washed our hats and then trimmed the brims off so that we didn't look like gangsters because we didn't play gangsters. But we did like hats. They're a dancer's best prop."
Movie Stars Parade. July 1947 Tap Happy.
You don’t read Gene Kelly’s palm to know the story of his life; you poke deep into musty corners of a closet and you find the tale in twenty pairs of dancing shoes. Sandals, acrobatic, clog, soft shoe, tap and ballet shoes, all of them thin, glove-like, and under the gathering dust; a brilliant array of colors. Some of them almost new, some battered and creased, one with a missing heel, and every one with a story – the story of the nimblest pair of feet in Hollywood, the story of the quick-tongued, fast-moving Irishman, Gene Kelly.
Cyd Charisse: He brought dance down to blue-collar status so that everybody could enjoy it. He was such a hard worker, such a perfectionist - and I always loved that because he got a lot out of you.
In the sense that Fred Astaire is a sophisticated dancer, a refined personality, Kelly is an innocent one: a lyric innocent, to be precise, and he brought to his dances a wonderful uncluttered sense of simple vitality: there was nothing extraneous or ostentatious about his dancing. He danced simply but fully: there was no holding back or holding down; no repression. Everything was given. It was this sense of burning bright enthusiasm, of high spirits done in high style, which made his work so exciting to watch.
John Cutts. Films & Filming 1964
Gene Kelly, a dancing legend in his own lifetime. Think of him as you will…in any of [his dancing] roles, and the image is essentially the same: someone in direct communication with the joys of life. A true blithe spirit.
Christopher Walken TCM tribute to Gene Kelly
When I was a lad starting out in show business you had to be a ‘triple threat’. When I think of a performer who fits that bill I think of Gene Kelly. He not only fitted, he defined it. The precision, skill and imagination with which he executed his craft broke boundaries and continues to influence modern dance everywhere.
?1932 Cap & Gown Review.
Florence Fisher Parry, Pittsburgh newspaper
Throw your academic caps in the air. You have a great dancing star on your campus.
Dancer From The Dance: Gene Kelly, television, and the beauty of movement. Velvet Light Trap, Spring 2002
For Kelly, masculine beauty of movement was ultimately achievable through a strategic and theoretical choreography that combined camera movement, corporeal gesture, and a functional mise-en-scene. The thesis further underscores the way in which the image of Gene Kelly as a popular masculine dancer and American artist is made available. 
John Cutts. Films & Filming 1964
He is essentially a mood dancer, expressing in physical movement a definite, often highly personal, attitude towards people, a situation, a life itself.
Astaire’s biographer, Satchel.
Astaire never appeared with bare chest, let alone bare arms or legs, as did Gene Kelly.
Kerry Novick, Ann Arbor 2002.
His ability to maintain the leading-man role while still dancing "has to do with his particular style of dance and his own personality. The style was athletic and that made it masculine. And also that it was unabashedly sexy."
John Springer. All Talking All Singing All Dancing. 1976
As Kelly progressed in screen stature, he brought new thrill to movie dancing. He was versatile; original - his dance numbers...were consistently fresh and unhackneyed; individual - his style was all his, hard-driving, athletic, acrobatic. You could never mistake Gene Kelly's dancing for that of anyone else
Cyd Charisse Kelly Girls. TV guide 2002
Any dancer when asked to dance with Gene Kelly would just faint right on the ground. That’s how wonderful he was.
Debbie Reynolds Kelly Girls
I think Gene was like his dances, all different and all great.
Mikhail Baryshnikov AFI 1985 booklet
Every dance Gene Kelly did on screen had a special. ..sense of occasion. No dancer has ever had his kind of dramatic range which easily encompasses many emotions – from radiance and sheer love of dancing to deep romance and poignancy.
Jeanine Basinger AFI booklet 1985
Audiences…danced down the street, taking their joy with them. It could be theirs forever…against that little bit of rain that into each of their lives would fall.
Sheridan Morley & Ruth Leon. Gene Kelly. A Celebration 1974
When Kelly dances he has moved so subtly from standing to movement to art that it looks as though anyone could do it.
Leslie Caron. The Magic Factory. Donald Knox
Gene was very clever as a choreographer. He would find out what the best points of a dancer were and make up a ballet around that. I was very weak and anaemic, but Gene was my defender.
Picture Show Magazine, date unknown
He said it all, in every number, without saying a word..He combined technique with feeling. No movement or emotion ever ended but was instead projected far beyond his body, reaching out to touch a star which he made us believe he could do.
Betty Comden
He was able to build a character through things that came out in dancing. He became a tremendous creative force.
Christopher Walken TCM tribute
To look at him he was almost like an Olympic athlete, so fit. He was grounded to the earth and utilised his entire body.
Film Dope 1984
He has done for heterosexual male dancers what Warren Beatty did for heterosexual male hairdressers
David Parkinson. Sight & Sound January 1993
‘Kelly’s fundamental motivation was his screen- dance mandate and commitment
to galvanizing the musical. His assault on the conventions of the classical Hollywood
narrative was born out of necessity- they were in the way.’
Peter Evans, Interview during the making of Hello Dolly
"Kelly", said a chorus boy in 'Hello Dolly', "Smashed the system. He wasn’t a skinny, elegant, long legged hero. Men could identify with him, women considered him obtainable."
For Kelly, an intricate and strategic use of the technology of the industrial arts was needed so that men no longer confused beauty of movement with effeminacy of movement. A good deal of his inner masculine beauty necessarily needed to be projected onto the screen to confirm its masculine essence.
Flying High. magazine article 1975
His erotic and sensual dancing of Slaughter On Tenth Avenue, the Pirate ballet, the Broadway Melody ballet, are illustrative of the kind of sexuality associated with Errol Flynn.
Richard Dyer Social Values of Entertainment & Show Business Volume 2. 1976
The modern dance approach gives the dancing a strength and physical
presence and sense of effort and strain, which express masculine activity
and power, and Kelly’s own body, with big thighs and shaped torso, is a
paradigm of muscular virility.
Violet Glaze. Pop Matters website
But what Astaire lacks, and Bruce Lee and Kelly share, is unadulterated power. Astaire was strong — you'd have to be, to do what he did — but he wore it in a way that was unobtrusive, all his horsepower subsumed into a fissure-less illusion of untroubled elegance. Kelly and Lee wore their fortitude visibly. Even though the essence of their might was very different — Kelly smooth and robust like a thoroughbred, Lee tight and swift like the tip of a whip — only fools and masochists would try and take their lunch money.
Richard Dyer 1976
‘His dedication as performer, choreographer and director leads to a striving
for effect, a desire to be more ‘meaningful’ and ‘serious’ and ‘artistically important’.
Where he has a hand in the choreography direction himself, he tends to depart
from the life assertive, optimistic, entertaining modes of dance expression
endemic to the musical and develop dance as a means of expressing conflict,
anxiety, stress and mood.’ 
Violet Glaze. Pop Matters website
Gene Kelly, the self-described Brando of dance (to Astaire's Cary Grant,) was physical, prowling and pacing in proletarian getups (like the very Stanley Kowalski t-shirt and jeans he wears to waltz with a mop in Thousands Cheer (1943)) with an undercurrent of animalism. He could dance just as well as Astaire and he telegraphed the same unabashed joy when he did, but his very he-man style carried a tinge of sex and violence that places him closer to Bruce Lee
Hollywood Greats. 2001
‘His goal was dancing for everybody and relating it to real life- working situations,
people…he was just a good fellow who was for the underdog, who was for the unions,
who was for the working man.’
On Sean France, ballet master for Missouri Contemporary Ballet Company. August 2007
France's grandparents worked the vaudeville circuit, and his parents' credits include work on Broadway and in Hollywood with such notables as Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Fosse and Jerome Robbins. Kelly - who famously employed ballet to great effect in the film "An American In Paris" - was France's godfather.
"Gene Kelly used to say that dance is something that is handed down from one person to the next," said France. "You can't learn it from a book, and you can't learn it from a video. It has to be passed down.”
John Cutts. Films & Filming 1964 
No mere pretender was Kelly, playing with happiness. Rather he WAS happy, often to the extent of appearing fully flushed. A most joyous, most happy dancing fella! A filmic Puck. A modern-day Pan. Full of dancing life force, and most contagious in his exuberance and merriment.
Look Magazine 1953. He has been known to be silent for seven days at a stretch when absorbed in one dance movement. But, on rare occasions, when, “faithful to his Irish past”, he will go on a three day holiday with old cronies – “talking, joking and drinking beer with salt in it”.
Jeanine Basinger. American Film March 85
In the Murphy’s chowder of film dance – tap, ballet, buck-and-wing, clog, soft-shoe, modern jazz, and just plain 
cheesecake – Gene Kelly is the man who threw in the overalls. He made dance accessible by presenting it in the everyday world, on city streets and sidewalks, on the slopes of heathered hills, and up and down the naked frames of houses under construction….He made dance seem possible, even probable, so that a generation spent years fully expecting someone like him to come dancing down the street armed only with a grin and an umbrella against misfortune, inclemency and the inevitable constabulary. Kelly was a proletariat dancing force that said anyone could do it. And should…
Before Kelly, whenever a dance number came along…it had somehow seemed extraordinary. There was a self-conscious quality to it, from the ‘here it comes’ opening music on through the ‘ta-da’ finale….Viewers understood that the magic folk up there were dancing for them because, being merely mortal, they couldn’t do it themselves. When movie stars danced, they let people see what joy it was, which wasn’t the same thing as making them participate in the dance. Kelly changed that….
He began to experiment with ways to bring the audience into the dance as a participant via the moving camera…the audience could experience the sensation of dance itself. They felt the dance as movement, and thus became not just viewers of dance, but dancers..
Kelly’s choreography was created not only with the camera in mind, but also editing. Numbers were designed to be cut without disturbing the viewer’s sense of motion and involvement. Kelly made dance fully cinematic and separated it from the stage.. He captured the kinetic force of the flesh-and-blood dancer in the image of the film. The long-range result was that people in the audience not only wanted to dance, but felt they could. …In many ways, Gene Kelly is the father of today’s dance explosion.
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service 2/2/96
…It is unfair to pigeonhole Kelly because if anything his genius of making it all look so easy, and especially so smooth, was what made him a dancer’s dancer. He could do just about anything.
Yes, there is that splashing…number in Singin’ In The Rain, an indelible moment in Kelly’s career and in the history of dance in movies. But remember, too, the sexy, riveting dream ballet later in the same movie, a sizzling duet with Cyd 
Charisse. Kelly oozed sensuality, sexiness.
He was not a wimpy, skinny dancer; he was a big-chested, muscular man whose physique belied the polish and flow with which he danced. Kelly had the raw power of a street performer and the controlled grace of a ballet dancer – and it made for a powerful combo….
Like other Broadway dancers, he kept his knees bent deeply giving him a weighted quality. But his torso had the ballet dancer’s ‘pulled up’ stance. And, as is crucial in a classical dance, his body, legs and arms moved in together, in-a-piece. He was not a hoofer with arms sort of stuck out like a scarecrow’s…
He seemed to have a specific connection to the dance form that other movie dancers did not. He was the first American to create a ballet for the Paris Opera Ballet. When San Fransisco Ballet, the oldest ballet company in the United States, celebrated its 50th anniversary, they chose Kelly to be the master of ceremonies.
He probably did more for dance as a movie star than he ever could have done as a dancer on the concert stage. Kelly introduced millions of movie-goers to the joys of pure dance. He just wrapped it up in a wonderfully entertaining package.
Keeping Up With Kelly. Photoplay magazine 1945.
He’ll take nothing less than perfection in his dancing and works constantly at dreaming up dance routines that on paper look like combined military operations. You could always find Gene still going strong at three and four a.m…setting the timing, mechanics and pantomime. Nothing he does surprises Betsy any more. She became used to seeing him sitting there in a trance, thinking something out, then suddenly taking off like a streamliner over the furniture around the room.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette. February 21st 1967
Hoe does the inventive Kelly feel about the current popular dance world? “It’s atavistic,” he replied. “Never in the history of mankind have people bee so permeated with luxury. And in the midst of opulence we’re dancing like savages. I can only comment on it, sociologists might go further.”
Ocala Star Banner. August 1st 1984
Gene Kelly says he likes break-dancing because it’s spontaneous…”The athleticism is inherent in it.”
Yves Montand. AFI booklet
Gene will always be our American in Paris and much more. He put dance on the street. He is in the people’s hearts everywhere – an American for the whole world.
