Ginger Rogers

Ginger Rogers, born Virginia Katherine McMath on July 16, 1911, in Independence, Missouri, was an American actress, dancer, and singer whose career spanned vaudeville, Broadway, film, radio, and television across much of the twentieth century. The only child of Lela Emogene Owens, a newspaper reporter, and William Eddins McMath, an electrical engineer, Rogers was of Scottish, Welsh, and English ancestry and was raised a Christian Scientist throughout her life. Her parents separated shortly after her birth, and her father kidnapped her twice before her mother divorced him. A young cousin who struggled to pronounce "Virginia" gave her the nickname Ginger. When Rogers was nine, her mother married John Logan Rogers, whose surname she adopted, and the family relocated to Fort Worth, Texas, where her mother worked as a theater critic.

Rogers's performing career began in earnest in 1925, when she entered and won a Charleston dance contest at the age of fourteen. The prize enabled her to tour for six months on the Orpheum Circuit as Ginger Rogers and the Redheads. At seventeen she married Jack Culpepper, a performer who worked under the name Jack Pepper; the two formed a short-lived vaudeville double act billed as Ginger and Pepper before the marriage ended within a year. Rogers returned to touring with her mother, and when the tour reached New York City she remained there, taking radio singing jobs. She made her Broadway debut in the musical Top Speed, which opened at Chanin's 46th Street Theatre on December 25, 1929, following its Philadelphia premiere at the Chestnut Street Opera House on November 13 of that year.

Within two weeks of Top Speed's New York opening, Rogers was cast in the Gershwin musical Girl Crazy, which made her an overnight star at nineteen. Fred Astaire had been hired to assist the production's dancers with choreography, marking an early connection between the two performers. Her Broadway work during this period also included the production Love and Let Love. Rogers would return to Broadway decades later, taking on the lead role in Hello, Dolly! in 1965, and subsequently made her stage directorial debut in 1985 with an off-Broadway production of Babes in Arms.

Her Broadway success in Girl Crazy led to a contract with Paramount Pictures, under which she made five films at Astoria Studios in Queens before extricating herself from the deal and moving to Hollywood. She signed with Pathé Exchange and later made films for Warner Bros., Monogram, and Fox. A significant breakthrough came with her supporting role as Anytime Annie in Warner Bros.' 42nd Street in 1933, followed by a notable turn in Gold Diggers of 1933, in which her performance of "We're in the Money" included a verse sung in Pig Latin. She then moved to RKO Studios, where her partnership with Astaire began in earnest on Flying Down to Rio.

From 1933 to 1939, Rogers and Astaire made nine musical films together at RKO, among them The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, and Swing Time, productions credited with revolutionizing the Hollywood musical and delivering some of RKO's greatest commercial successes. Following two films with Astaire that performed poorly at the box office, Rogers shifted her focus to dramatic and comedy roles. Critics and audiences responded favorably to her performances in Stage Door, Vivacious Lady, Bachelor Mother, Primrose Path, and The Major and the Minor, among others. Her role in Kitty Foyle in 1940 earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress, and through that decade she became one of Hollywood's highest-paid performers. She reunited with Astaire in 1949 for The Barkleys of Broadway, produced at MGM, which proved commercially successful. She starred in the comedy Monkey Business in 1952 and received critical praise for Tight Spot in 1955. Over the course of her film career, Rogers appeared in 73 pictures.

Beyond film, Rogers continued working in stage, television, and print. She made television appearances as late as 1987 and published her autobiography, Ginger: My Story, in 1991. In 1992 she was honored at the Kennedy Center Honors. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her fourteenth on its list of the greatest female stars of classic American cinema. Rogers died of natural causes on April 25, 1995, at the age of eighty-three.