American dancer, singer and actress during the Golden Age of Hollywood, a strawberry-blonde glamour queen swathed in chic with a firm gaze, strong stride and down-home vowels. Rogers glided across the silver screen with her famous partner dancer, Fred Astaire in ten films. Their most notable film was “Top Hat,” a 1935 musical. The dancer prided herself on never taking a formal dance lesson. Rogers struggled to establish her own solo acting abilities and triumphed with her Oscar award for Best Actress in the 1940 drama, “Kitty Foyle.” She wrote her autobiography, “Ginger: My Story” in 1991 and accepted a Kennedy Center Honor in December 1992. Her career in the entertainment industry began in vaudeville, reaching to television spanning over 65 years.
Virginia Katherine McMath was born in Independence, Missouri where her mother, Lela Rogers was a news reporter. The family moved to Fort Worth, Texas. She made her debut on stage at Central High School in Fort Worth in 1924 in a play written by her mother. As a teenager, she won a Charleston dance contest. She went on to the vaudeville circuit with the name of Ginger Rogers, the surname from her stepfather. Her mother gave up her career as a reporter and scriptwriter to manage her daughter’s budding show business career.
In 1928, she worked in the act, “Ginger and Pepper” with her first husband Jack Culpepper. In 1929, at 19, she appeared on the Broadway stage in “Top Seed.” She was working at Paramount’s Long Island studios at the same time. She appeared in a small role in “Young Man of Manhattan.” Film audiences were delighted with her one gag line – “Cigarette me, big boy.” The line became a part of the American idiom of the day. She won acclaim in George Gershwin’s “Girl Crazy” on Broadway and quickly sent to Hollywood in late 1930-31. Rogers worked in song and dance spectaculars, dramas and comedies. She first danced with Fred Astaire in “Girl Crazy” in 1930. At the time, critics felt Rogers self-taught dance style could not equal Astaire’s finesse. She was able to silence the opposition and proved she had the necessary dance techniques and expertise to team with Astaire. On screen, the couple had chemistry, off-screen Astaire and Rogers were strictly working partners with different interests. Publicity studio men started rumors about the couple having disagreements off-screen in order to keep their names in the gossip papers. Nothing was further than the truth. Rogers and Astaire always liked and admired each other’s talents and respected their work. By 1939, their careers as a dance couple together ran its course and they sought solo projects in the industry. She performed on Broadway shows into her late 70s.
Rogers married her second husband, actor Lew Ayres, in 1934. She married her third husband, Marine Private Jack Briggs, nine years her junior, in 1943. In 1953, she married her fourth husband, Parisian attorney-actor and 15 years her junior, Jacques Bergerac. She married her fifth husband actor-director-producer William Marshall in 1961. They formed their own movie production company in Jamaica in 1961. Rogers never had children and never suffered regrets for that decision.
A staunch Republican, Rogers fought hard against President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. She was a devout Christian Scientist who boasted that she never drank or smoked. However she was frequently stopped and fined by Los Angeles police for running red lights and speeding violations. She enjoyed changing her hair color frequently and preferred modern furniture and eye-catching art. Rogers remained slim by avoiding lunch and eating modestly. By 1943, she was one of the ten highest-paid Americans. She invested her six-figure salary in blue chip stocks and land including a 1,100-acre ranch on Oregon’s Rogue River. Buying the ranch in 1939, she fished, golfed, played tennis, cooked, painted and managed her investments from her property. She was an active and proud member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Rogers had an extremely close and loving relationship with her mother, Lela Rogers. She grew angry when the media tried to label her mother a “stage mom.” The two remained very close and she phoned her mother daily to tell her “I love you.” She called her mother the most influential person in her life. She felt her mother embodied dignity and good “horse sense.”
Asked if aging bothered her Rogers replied, “Age can’t take your individuality away from you, and that’s what counts.” She died at her home in Rancho Mirage, California on 25 April 1995 at 7 AM at age 83 from natural causes.
Link to Wikipedia biography