“Astaire really sweat - he toiled. He was a humorless Teutonic man, the opposite of his debonair image in top hat and tails. I liked him because he was an entertainer and an artist. There's a distinction between them. An artist is concerned only with what is acceptable to himself, where an entertainer strives to please the public. Astaire did both. Louis Armstrong was another one.”

— Fred Astaire

Artie Shaw on his collaboration with Astaire in Second Chorus (1940) as interviewed in Fantle, Dave and Johnson, Tom. Reel to Real. Badger Books LLC, 2004, p. 304. ISBN 1932542043.

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Fred Astaire 73

American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and televisio… 1899–1987

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“Mr. Llewellyn paused. Mr. Trout had begun to float about the room like something out of Swan Lake, and Mr. Llewellyn disapproved of this. He was apt to be a martinet in his dealings with his legal advisers, demanding that lawyers should behave like lawyers and leave eccentric dancing to the professionals. A man, he held, is either Fred Astaire or he is not Fred Astaire, and if he is not Fred Astaire he should not carry on like him.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

From P.G. Wodehouse's Bachelors Anonymous (1973).

“If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.”

David Hockney (1937) British artist

Interview with Paul Joyce, New York, (September 1986) quoted in Hockney on Photography, ed. Wendy Brown (1988)
1980s

“I suspect it is this Camelot view that leads Miss Croce to be rather unfair to Gene Kelly…I should say the difference starts with their bodies. If you compare Kelly to Astaire, accepting Astaire's debonair style as perfection then, of course, Kelly looks bad. But in popular dance forms, in which movement is not rigidly codified, as it is in ballet, perfection is a romantic myth or a figure of speech, nothing more. Kelly isn't a winged dancer; he's a hoofer and more earthbound. But he has warmth and range as an actor…Astaire's grasshopper lightness was his limitation as an actor - confining him to perennial gosh-oh-gee adolescence;; he was always and only a light comedian and could function only in fairytale vehicles.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Pauline Kael, responding to Croce in her review of Croce's The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, writing in The New Yorker, November 25, 1972, as reproduced in Kael, Pauline. Reeling: Film Writings 1972-1975, Marion Boyars, London - New York, pp. 58-59. ISBN 0-7145-2582-0.

“In the 1930s, when I started, Martha Graham was the only dancer doing anything modern, but she did it all to classical music. I couldn't see myself doing Swan Lake every night, and I wanted to develop a truly American style. The only dancer in the movies at that time with any success was Fred Astaire, but he did very small, elegant steps in a top hat, white tie, and tails.”

Gene Kelly (1912–1996) American dancer, actor, singer, director, producer and choreographer

Quoted in "Gene Kelly's Musical Memories"

“Fred taught me a step because I said I can't let this experience be over without my learning something. He taught me the most wonderful Fred Astaire-like step, with an umbrella. It was a complete throwaway; it was almost invisible. It was in the way he walked. As he moved along, he bounced the umbrella on the floor to the beat and then he grabbed it. It was effortless and invisible. As a matter of fact, a few years later I was photographing Gene Kelly and told him that Fred Astaire had taught me this trick with an umbrella. And Kelly said, "Oh I'll teach you one," and he did, and the two tricks with the umbrella in some way define the difference between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and, in my view, demonstrate who is the greater of the two artists. With Gene Kelly, he threw the umbrella way up into the air, and then he moved to catch it, very slowly, grabbing it behind his back. It was a big, grandstand play, about nothing.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Richard Avedon in Silverman, Stephen M. Dancing on the Ceiling. Knopf, 1996. ISBN 0679414126.

“After he had gone over the mansion, his entertainer asked him what he thought of the splendours it contained; and he in reply did full justice to the riches of its owner and the skill of its decorators, but he added, "Lions would have fared better, had lions been the artists."”

John Henry Newman (1801–1890) English cleric and cardinal

Lecture I, Section 1.
Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851)

“Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was — nobody any longer wanted to be that.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

C 36
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook C (1772-1773)

“…What people miss about (Marilyn) Manson is that he is just reflecting, he's an artist, people want to focus that energy on him, but it's not really him, it's really about you. So for every guy sitting there with a beer and a.45 in his belt, Manson is just speaking to that end of society. He's speaking as an artist. He's not speaking as himself, and that's where people get really lost with Manson.”

Billy Corgan (1967) American musician, songwriter, producer, and author

Corgan, William. Interview. 1998 Pre-Grammy Show. MTV. 25 February 1998.

“Do you understand? Man needs entertainment simply to hide his madness. If he was perfectly sane, he would not need entertainment. He could just sit and watch this bamboo grow. He does not really need entertainment.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Mystic's Musings

“As a dancer he stands alone, and no singer knows his way around a song like Fred Astaire.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Irving Berlin, quoted in Puttin' on the Ritz, BBC Programme Acquisition, 1999.

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Fred Astaire 73

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