Director worked with Gene Kelly on two of the best-loved Hollywood musicals
Stepping on stage to accept an honorary Oscar in 1998, Stanley Donen declared that words were inadequate, adding: ‘‘In musicals, that’s when we do a song . . .’’ At which point he delighted the audience with his rendition of: ‘‘Heaven, I’m in heaven/ and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.’’ He held the statuette to his face, imitating the ‘‘dancing cheek to cheek’’ line, while tap dancing.
Donen, who has died aged 94, was a pivotal figure in the great age of the Hollywood musical. He came to films with credentials as a dancer and choreographer, but it was in bringing all the elements together as a director that he made his contribution.
In his two most famous films, On the
Town (1949) and
Singin’ in the
Rain (1952), he shared the director credit with Gene Kelly, often downplaying his own efforts. ‘‘Anybody who says that every picture is not a collaboration is an idiot,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s just a question of how much you collaborate, and who you collaborate with.’’ Yet many knew that it was Donen who had, at the age of just 25, effectively liberated the musical from the Broadway stage.
On the Town, which followed three sailors, played by Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin, on 24-hour shore leave in New York, captured the flavour of the city by letting the camera loose on its streets and buildings, creating a joyous and thrilling kaleidoscope of song, dance and colour.
Singin’ in the Rain, which satirised Hollywood’s fumbling attempts to adjust to the talkies, was no less flamboyant, with Donen being largely responsible for scenes such as the breathtaking crane shot as Kelly swings round and round holding his umbrella at arm’s length. ‘‘The dance took a day and a half to shoot, but it turned out so well that we couldn’t really call the film anything else,’’ Donen recalled.
Stanley Isaac Donen was born in Columbia, South Carolina, into a Jewish family. ‘‘My childhood wasn’t very happy,’’ he told the film writer Ronald Bergan. ‘‘It’s a long, grim story about being a Jew in a small southern town.’’
The cinema provided an escape from antisemitism, with the film that made the most impact being Flying Down to Rio, the 1933 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical, which he claimed to have seen 40 times.
His father gave him an 8mm home-movie camera and he started dancing at the age of 10, moving to New York at 16 to make his Broadway debut as a chorus boy in the original production of Pal Joey, starring Kelly. ‘‘I was nothing at the time,’ a ‘schlepper’,’’ he said in 1975. ‘‘And I remember being impressed by Gene as soon as I saw him on stage.’’
A year later he helped Kelly with the choreography on another Broadway show,
film director b April 13, 1924 d February 21, 2019
‘‘The dance took a day and a half to shoot, but it turned out so well that we couldn’t really call the film anything else.’’ Stanley Donen on Singin’ in the Rain
Contact us Best Foot Forward, and, not yet 20, moved to Hollywood at Kelly’s request to work on the 1943 film version. A 1974 biography of Kelly describes Donen at that time as a ‘‘nice, eager, funny youngster, with an attractive voice, a lively personality and large, brown glamorous eyes like those of a gazelle’’.
During the war years Donen choreographed about a dozen films. ‘‘There were a lot of musical films being made . . . because people needed cheering up,’’ he explained. He worked with Kelly on Cover Girl (1944) and suggested Kelly’s dancing with a cartoon mouse routine for Anchors Aweigh (1945). He was choreographer and co-writer on Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949), and directed Royal Wedding (1951), which famously featured Astaire dancing on a ceiling.
At about the same time, he was making a series of visits to the matrimonial altar, followed by appointments with his divorce lawyers. Having dated the actress Judy Holliday while working on Broadway, his first marriage, from 1948 to 1951, was to the dancer Jeanne Coyne; she went on to marry Kelly in 1960. Donen then enjoyed a fling with Elizabeth Taylor before marrying the actress Marion Marshall, who was later married to Robert Wagner. After their divorce in 1959 he was married from 1960 to 1971 to Adelle, the former wife of the 2nd Earl Beatty. His fourth marriage, to the actress Yvette Mimieux, lasted the longest, from 1972 to 1985. He was married to wife No 5, Pamela Braden, who was 36 years his junior, from 1990 to 1994, having proposed to her only four days after they met.
Since 1999 his partner had been Elaine May, the writer, director and actress. She survives him with a son from his second marriage, Joshua, and a son from his third marriage, Mark, who is a production assistant. Another son from his second marriage, Peter, died from a heart attack in 2003 at the age of 50.
His final film, Blame it on Rio (1984), a limp sex comedy with Michael Caine, was a disappointing farewell.
Nevertheless, Donen kept the twinkle in his eye and his ability to tell a good tale. He recalled on one occasion introducing the 77-year-old Charlie Chaplin to Sophia Loren, remembering Chaplin muttering: ‘‘Ah, to be 65 again.’’
Although Donen’s films won many Oscars, he received none himself until the honorary award in 1998. On accepting it Donen let the audience ‘‘in on the secret of being a good director’’ by name-checking many of those with whom he had worked, adding as he flourished the statuette: ‘‘When filming starts, you show up and you stay the hell out of the way. But you’ve got to show up . . . otherwise you can’t take the credit and get one of these fellas.’’ – The Times
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