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.”
