GINGER ROGERS, in the oney-may

on Stage Door and her other definitive roles, with and beyond Astaire:

Rogers was capable of that tough-minded and frank and bleak attitude on screen, but in life and in general she was actually, and alarmingly, one of the most clueless of stars, never quite knowing what it was that people liked about her. Starting as early 1938, the year she made Vivacious Lady and Carefree, something peculiar started to happen to Rogers. After years of the most unlikely and enormous success in her Astaire films, where she was up to any dance challenge he gave her and where her timing in both musical and comic and dramatic scenes was magically sharp, her timing started to go horribly awry. Rogers began to be afflicted by self-consciousness, miscalculation, cutesiness, self-infatuated archness and flashes of deep-rooted mean-mindedness. She slipped back into her best controlled star mode in several films after that year, but she started to deteriorate more and more by the mid-1940s, almost as if someone had put a curse on her.

http://chiseler.org/post/59767959096/ginger-rogers-curse-of-the-working-class

shit, did she die again?

no, she just had no thread.

Roxie Hart is the best version of Chicago, as long as we can't get in a time machine and see the '70s Broadway Fosse musical.

My theory would be that the onscreen tension between Astaire and Rogers was based on the fact that he was a relentless perfectionist and she was just an exuberant 'natural' actor. This worked wonders for their chemistry for a few years, but Astaire's nit-picky analytical approach and constant criticism finally broke her confidence, so that self-doubt crept in and like the self-concious millipede, once she started thinking about how to act, she found it too complicated and lost her way.

as great as fred astaire was you always have to remember this: when they had sex, ginger had to do it backwards and in high heels!

hey, morbz, i have an autographed ginger rogers scrapbook/program thing that her daughter put out. you can have it if you want. its from the 70's. just in case you are collecting ginger mementos.

thx, but I don't take things that far. And I need to throw out most of the mementos I possess.

gotcha.

i just checked and she was in like 70+ movies and i've probably only seen about 10 of them.

I LOVE her in Gold Diggers of '33 but Ball steals Stage Door for me.

"...where she was intriguingly cast as Jean Harlow’s mother..."

Lela's not far off from Mama...

VIVACIOUS LADY with James Stewart is quite a charming comedy (1938).

Stewart plays an Assistant Professor of Botany, GR a nightclub dancer who's also smart and sharp. She also puts up her dukes and fights in one scene.

CAREFREE (1938): Ginger Rogers is psychoanalysed by Fred Astaire. While under a mysterious anaesthetic she goes out into the New York streets and causes havoc.

Remarkable how game and tough Rogers is: I find her the true star of every picture I see her in.