During a tour of Europe with a ballet company, 17 year old Tula Ellice Finklea of Amarillo married her instructor Nico Charisse, 32, in Paris on Aug. 12, 1939.
If the name on her birth certificate fails to ring a bell, how about Cyd Charisse, the beautiful brunette who danced her way to stardom in the classic Hollywood musicals of the 1940s and 1950s? She had gone by “Sid” since childhood because that was how her baby brother mispronounced “Sis” and probably because anything was better than Tula.
To overcome the effects of a mild case of polio, Sid Finklea’s mother and father enrolled their sickly six year old in a dance class. By the age of 12, the gifted girl had learned everything the hired tutors could teach her, so her folks sent her to Los Angeles to study ballet. After only two more years of advanced instruction, the Panhandle prodigy was accepted by the prestigious Ballet Ruse de Monte Carlo and began performing under the name “Felia Siderova.”
In August 1939, the month after the teenaged Texan’s surprise marriage, Germany invaded Poland in the opening act of the Second World War. The tour was cancelled, the company dissolved and the newlyweds rushed back to the safety of the United States.
A young woman with Sid’s looks and talent did not go without work for long in Hollywood. A dancing part in the 1943 movie Something To Shout About was followed by similar roles in two other forgettable films that same year. But don’t look for Sid in the credits. She appeared in all three under the stage alias “Lily Norwood.”
But those early efforts did not go unnoticed. Sid caught the eye of the studio scouts at MGM, reigning monarch of Hollywood musicals, and was soon signed to a long-term contract. MGM started their fresh face off with minor parts in three movies: The Harvey Girls, a Judy Garland vehicle that featured Sid’s first spoken words, Till the Clouds Roll By and Ziegfeld Follies, which opened with the newcomer tripping the light fantastic with none other than Fred Astaire.
Prior to its release, Ziegfeld Follies producer Arthur Freed changed Sid’s name one last time. He took her married name, tinkered with the spelling of her moniker and came up with Cyd Charisse.
That was in 1946. Cyd made ten run-of-the-mill musicals for MGM over the next six years, but her career seemed to be stalled in second gear. All that changed with an historic casting choice for Singin’ in the Rain.
The movie was already in the can, when producer Freed decided it needed a dream sequence ballet for the finale. Leading man Gene Kelly pushed for his assistant to get the female part, but Freed went with the studio’s resident ballerina – Cyd Charisse.
Co-director Stanley Donen later reminisced about the iconic scene: “We needed someone who could stop a man by just sticking up her leg. Cyd was stunning. We stuck a hat on the end of her foot and handed her a cigarette holder. I had to cue her to exhale the cigarette smoke for when Gene (Kelly) first runs into her, because she couldn’t handle the smoke.”
That turned out to be the big break Cyd had been waiting for. A year later, she was cast as the female lead opposite Fred Astaire for The Band Wagon. During the filming, Astaire amused the crew by obsessively comparing his slight stature to Cyd’s height. Although she was just five-foot-six in her stocking feet, high heels and unusually long legs made her look much taller.
However, his fragile ego aside, Astaire had nothing but high praise for Cyd in his 1959 autobiography Steps in Time. He fondly referred to his former partner as “beautiful dynamite” and added, “That Cyd! When you’ve danced with her, you stayed danced with.”
She returned the compliment in the joint memoir The Two of Us written in 1976 with her husband of 60 years, Tony Martin. “Fred moved like glass,” she said simply.
Cyd made three more movies with her famous partners. She teamed up twice with Gene Kelly for Brigadoon in 1954 and It’s Always Fair Weather two years later and with Astaire for Silk Stockings in 1957. Then the final curtain came down on the Hollywood musical.
Cyd told an interviewer in 2002 that her husband could always tell with which of the two she had been dancing. “If I was black and blue, it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn’t have a mark on me.”
Cyd did not shy away from a critical evaluation of Astaire and Kelly. “As one of the handful of girls who worked with both of those dance geniuses, I think I can give an honest comparison. In my opinion, Kelly is the more inventive choreographer of the two. Astaire…creates fabulous numbers for himself and his partner. But Kelly can create an entire number for somebody else. To sum it up, I’d say they were the two greatest dancing personalities who were ever on screen.”
But Cyd Charisse, who passed away in 2008 at 86 years old, certainly ranks a close third.
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