Gene Kelly

Gene Kelly was the man who dragged Hollywood musicals into the second half of the twentieth century. If the first was represented by Fred and Ginger in top hat, white tie and tails, then the second was Gene splashing through the puddles of Singin' in the Rain.
Kelly took dancing out of the ballrooms and boudoirs of the 1930s and set it alive on the streets of downtown Manhattan: as befitted the original Pal Joey, he brought a gritty kind of realism to what had always been a fantasy, and above all he liberated dance and dancers on screen at just the postwar moment when the American cinema itself was first coming to grips with the new filmgoers.
He was also of course an actor, choreographer and director, but it is as the first modern screen dancer that Kelly, the boy from the Irish streets of Pittsburgh, will always be remembered. In this lavishly illustrated critical celebration, the critics and biographers Sheridan Morley and Ruth Leon look back at a remarkable and influential career on both sides of the camera.