Dancer worked stage and screen

Continued to perform into his 80s, dies at 100

Marc Platt, a lively and versatile dancer who had standout roles onstage and in films, including in the original 1943 Broadway production of Oklahoma! and as one of the virile young woodsmen seeking spouses in the 1954 film musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, died Saturday in San Rafael, Calif. He was 100.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Donna Platt.

Marc Platt demonstrated the range of his talent in the 1945 musical film Tonight and Every Night, starring Rita Hayworth. He plays a dancer auditioning for a theatre modelled on the Windmill, which was famous for putting on performances through the London blitz of Second World War. When a skeptical director asks during a tryout what he likes to dance to, Platt’s character replies: “Oh, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Gilbert and Sullivan. Whatever’s coming in over the radio.”

The director then proceeds to change stations on a radio unpredictably. In a little less than two minutes, Platt’s character puts on a clinic, shifting with verve from classical ballet to athletic tap to more

“Always do what you love for as long as you can.” MARC PLATT

raucous swing moves.

Platt himself had been adapting for years at that point, changing more than just his dancing styles.

Before he was Marc Platt he was Marc Platoff. His name was Russianized when, as a young dancer training in Seattle in the 1930s, he was accepted as a member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. The company had been in the city on tour, and a supporter arranged for Platt to audition.

“How do you do? You have dance? Do!” the choreographer, Leonide Massine, told him in a thick Russian accent, Platt recalled in a 2005 interview with The Seattle Times.

As he put it in a documentary about the company, “I just danced my fool head off.”

He toured with the Ballet Russe for six years, scraping by financially but building a reputation. Onstage in Oklahoma!, he danced in Agnes de Mille’s Dream Ballet sequence alongside Katharine Sergava, and also appeared in the film. In Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, he played Daniel Pontipee, one of the brothers who go from rough-hewed to refined dancers, as well as from single to married.

Before he was Marc Platt or Marc Platoff, he was Marcel Emile Gaston Leplat, born Dec. 2, 1913, in Pasadena, Calif. His father, Maurice, was a violinist who had immigrated from France. The family later moved to Seattle, where his father taught at what is now the Cornish College for the Arts. He began dancing when he was 11.

Survivors include a son, Ted Leplat, from his first marriage, to Eleanor Marra, a former Ballet Russe dancer, which ended in divorce; two children, Donna and Michael Platt, from his second marriage, to Jean Goodall, who died in 1994; and a granddaughter.

While he was with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Platt (then Platoff) choreographed the company’s 1939 production of Ghost Town, composed by Richard Rodgers.

After his dancing career slowed in the 1960s, he spent eight years as the producer and director of Radio City Music Hall’s ballet troupe. In the early 1970s, he and Goodall opened a ballet school in Fort Myers, Fla. Platt later moved to Northern California and continued to perform through his 80s, appearing often in local productions of “The Nutcracker.”

At a party celebrating his 100th birthday, he told The San Francisco Chronicle: “Always do what you love for as long as you can.”