Cyd Charisse

The leggy dancer who floated across the silver screen

Cyd Charisse

1922–2008

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When Tula Ellice Finklea was 6, she was stricken with a mild case of polio. “I was this tiny, frail little girl,” she recalled. “I needed to build up muscle.” So she began taking ballet lessons. Many years later, as Cyd Charisse, she would become one of Hollywood’s most elegant and beloved dancers. Fred Astaire called her “beautiful dynamite.”

It was a long way from her hometown of Amarillo, Texas, where Finklea’s brother nicknamed her “Sid,” a corruption of “Sis,” said the Los Angeles Times. Following her initial training with instructor Nico Charisse, she was invited to join the Ballet Russe and danced under the stage names Natacha Tulaelis and Felia Siderova. “In 1939, while in France on tour, she and Charisse eloped.” Back in the U.S., she appeared in several minor films; when producer Arthur Freed cast her in Ziegfeld Follies (1946), he tweaked the spelling of her first name, and as Cyd Charisse she won a seven-year contract with MGM.

She was a natural beauty, “from her dark eyes and toothpaste-ad smile to her long, tapered shins and slim ankles,” said The Washington Post. Her ballet training gave her “a whole different way of carrying herself, pulled up and light, her legs stroking forward like a cat’s.” In the finale of Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Charisse partnered with Gene Kelly as both “a dangerously leggy gun moll in a green flapper dress and the chaste dancer in a white tutu whose long scarf floats in the air.” The following year in The Band Wagon, she paired with Fred Astaire. Their languorous rendition of “Dancing in the Dark,” played against the backdrop of New York’s Central Park, was remarkable in its simplicity and intensity—“simply walking around, deepening their synchronization and emotional sympathies so that by the end of it they’re like one person, but with a sense of physical restraint as palpable as fire.” Charisse performed memorably with both Kelly and Astaire again, in Brigadoon (1954) and Silk Stockings (1957), respectively. Kelly, she found, was rougher than Astaire. “If I was black and blue, it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn’t have a scratch.”

Charisse continued to make movies up until 1989 and, in 1992, at age 70, she made her Broadway debut in Grand Hotel. She spent the later part of her career performing mainly with her second husband, Tony Martin, in a successful song-and-dance act in nightclubs and on TV. He survives her, as do their son and a son from her marriage to Charisse.