Cyd Charisse: An Appreciation
June 18th, 2008
By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
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Let’s get the physical stuff out of the way first: Cyd Charisse had the finest legs in Hollywood, was the greatest dancer – and unquestionably the most sensuous — to ever grace the silver screen in a skirt and was every bit as good as the great Fred Astaire and the almost as great Gene Kelly.
Given those attributes, the fact that Charisse could hold her own as an actress put her in rarified territory, and if there was a downside to her career it was that she was relegated to more conventional rolls when the era of the great screen musicals ended in the 1950s.
Oh, and she was married to the same man for nearly 60 years, a notable length for Tinseltown.
Charisse was born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Texas, in 1922 by her own account (or 1921, according to others) to a homemaker mother and jeweler father. Her nickname was “Sid” for how a younger sibling tried to say “Sis,” later changed by the ever inventive MGM publicity machine to “Cyd” to give her an air of mystery.
Sid/Cyd was a sickly girl who started dancing lessons at age 6 at the suggestion of her father to build up her strength after a bout with polio left her with a slight atrophy on her right side. During a family vacation in Los Angeles when she was 12, her parents enrolled her in ballet classes at a school in Hollywood, where one of her teachers was Nico Charisse.
At 14 she auditioned for and studied ballet in Los Angeles with Adolph Bolm and Bronislava Nijinska, and subsequently danced in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo for Colonel W. de Basil under the stage names Celia Siderova and later Maria Istromena because everyone in the troupe was required to take a Russian-sounding name. It was while touring in Europe that she again met Nico Charisse. They eloped in Paris in 1939 and divorced in 1947.
The Ballet Russes broke up at the outbreak of World War II and Charisse, who was to keep her husband’s name, returned to Los Angeles, where David Lichine offered her a dancing role in Gregory Ratoff’s Something to Shout About (1943). This brought her to the attention of choreographer Robert Alton, who had also discovered Gene Kelly, and soon signed with MGM, where she became the resident ballet dancer.
Charisse is, of course, principally celebrated for her on-screen pairings with Fred Astaire and Kelly.
Her lithe body, gorgeous looks and simmering sensuality — as well as having extraordinary chops because of her Russian ballet training — contrasted starkly with the usual Hollywood dancers, who film historian Larry Billman wrote were “typically cute and fluffy.”
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