Saturdays with the Stars: Cyd Charisse

Each month of 2019 we will be looking at the careers of the leading ladies of Classical Hollywood who were never nominated for an Academy Award as part of our "Saturdays with the Stars" series.  Last month, we focused on Virginia Mayo, a major player at Warner Brothers, best remembered for her work in classic parts in The Best Years of Our Lives and White Heat.  This month we go with one of the most treasured performers on the MGM lot during the latter stages of Mayo's career, Ms. Cyd Charisse.

Charisse, like Mayo, was a dancer, but unlike Mayo who was more noted as an actress, this feels like the first thing you recall when you discuss her filmography, which extended across multiple decades but most of her success as a leading woman came in the 1950's.  Charisse started off her career in ballet, eventually gaining success by dancing with a Russian company in Monte Carlo.  When the company broke up, she caught the eye of an MGM choreographer after appearing opposite Don Ameche in Something to Shout About, and became an important supporting dancer at MGM before finally breaking into work as a leading woman against Stewart Granger in The Wild North.

Charisse is a cool choice for this project for me personally because, while I've only seen 2 Charisse pictures (including her wordless ballet sequence in Singin' in the Rain), she is an actress I am well aware of because she's a favorite of my mom's, and because so many of her films are hailed as masterpieces today.  Charisse never got an Oscar nomination partially because she was (according to critics) more of a dancer than she was a proper actress, but she appeared in many of the major MGM musicals of the 1950's, dancing alongside Gene Kelly & Fred Astaire.

The other strange thing about Charisse's career is that it existed at all.  MGM is thought of as one of the truly great movie houses of this era, but Charisse is actually odd in that almost all of her major films were flops.  Pictures like The Band Wagon, Brigadoon, It's Always Fair Weather, and Silk Stockings, considered some of the finest musicals ever made, were not profitable in their era so it's staggering to me that Charisse continued to get to make bomb after bomb.  Weirdly it was the dramas like Party Girl and The Wild North that actually made any money for the studios, as they're almost completely lost in Charisse's filmography.  This month, as I learn more about Charisse, we'll be exploring both the profitable and disappointing aspects of her years as a leading woman, and I hope you'll join us.