Watch Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain

“When you’ve danced with her, you stay danced with,” was Fred Astaire’s famous verdict on Cyd Charisse, whom he memorably partnered in a number of electrifying sequences in the 1953 film The Band Wagon, in which she played a has-been classical dancer to his go-getting producer of musicals. The physical equipment that evoked the Astaire tribute (he also called her “beautiful dynamite”) included a wonderfully athletic dance technique, riveting good looks and simply fabulous legs.

Her and Astaire’s performance of the duet Dancing in the Dark, in the film, blended erotic passion with the acme of technical accomplishment to give a simply peerless performance. She was subsequently to be equally complimentary about her partner. Astaire, she said “moved like glass”.

Although by that stage Charisse had been in film in some form or other for ten years, she had come spectacularly to prominence only the previous year in Singin’ in the Rain, a movie-about-the-movies in which she partnered Gene Kelly. In that film her character had no name and did not need one. She was there to provide, with Kelly, an exhilarating ballet sequence which was strictly nothing to do with the rest of the film, but is one of the most dazzling of its many pleasures.

Times Archive, 1977: Living with a long-legged legend

Cyd Charisse makes her London stage debut

• Follies and fantasies in the world's glitter capital

Related Links

• Cyd Charisse dies aged 86

Multimedia

• Pictures: Cyd Charisse

For the Broadway Rhythm ballet in the movie Charisse appeared as Kelly’s distant femme fatale, tall, slim with a helmet of dark hair — and in a brilliant green dress which split to reveal those “longest legs in films”. At the peak of her career they were said to have been insured for $5 million, and some reports put it higher. They remained her trademark well into her old age.

In the great era of the MGM musical, of which Singin’ in the Rain was the apogee, Charisse was the screen’s unrivalled female dancer. She had trained in classical ballet and brought to her work an artistic grace that transcended merely accomplished hoofing. Her training had given her a disciplined approach to her work, and her reputation was as a reliable performer who never threw tantrums. As in Singin’ in the Rain her contributions to films were often free-standing sequences, built around her particular talent.

When the cycle of MGM musicals came to an end in the late 1950s she switched to straight parts. But as an actress, while an attractive presence, she was a little stiff and no more than competent. But she was never under any illusions about her acting technique, and lost little sleep over it. Audiences came to see the beautiful face — and those legs. Charisse was not a singer, either, and her voice was usually dubbed. Her time at the top was relatively short, and by the time she turned 40 she had done her best work.

She was born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Texas. Many sources give her year of birth as 1921, though her agent has said it was 1922. Spurred on by her father, Ernest, a jeweller and ballet enthusiast, and following a doctor’s recommendation that she take exercise after a mild bout of polio, she started ballet lessons from the age of 8. She studied in Hollywood under Nico Charisse and he introduced her to Colonel de Basil, who signed her for his Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Performing under the concocted Russian names of Maria Istomina and Felia Sidorova, she toured Europe and in 1939, when she was 17, she married Charisse in Paris.

She started in films as a bit-part player in 1943 under the name of Lily Norwood, playing the Russian ballerina Ulanova in Mission to Moscow. She became Cyd Charisse when she was put under contract by MGM in 1946. Cyd was a feminine version of Sid, the nickname she had apparently acquired from her little brother, who in infancy had struggled to say “sis”.

The MGM contract came after she had a brief ballet sequence in Ziegfeld Follies (1946), directed by Vincente Minnelli who would be an important figure in her career. There followed speciality spots in Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), The Kissing Bandit (1948) and Words and Music (1948) before Singin’ in the Rain made her a star in 1952. But she missed out on Easter Parade with a knee injury and she ceded the lead role in An American in Paris to Leslie Caron because of pregnancy.

After Singin’ in the Rain her most striking performance was in The Band Wagon, again directed by Minnelli. In playing a classical dancer who initially finds it demeaning to appear in musical comedy, she was, paradoxically, forced to express feelings that would simply never have occurred to her in real life. All performance was grist to her mill.

She was with Kelly again in Brigadoon (1954) and It’s Always Fair Weather (1955) and she partnered Astaire once more in Rouben Mamoulian’s Silk Stockings (1957), a musical version of the Greta Garbo vehicle, Ninotchka. As a dancer Charisse was, of course, as polished as ever, but as an actress in Garbo’s old role she was bound to suffer by the comparison.

Silk Stockings effectively marked the end of her career in screen musicals though she had her moments as a nightclub entertainer in Nicholas Ray’s dark thriller, Party Girl (1958), notably when performing a jungle dance.

The best of her later straight roles was as the former wife of Kirk Douglas’s fading screen star in Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), again directed by Minnelli who, like her, had switched to straight drama after making his name with musicals. Shot in Italy, it was one of a number of films Charisse made in Europe after opportunities in Hollywood dried up.

She continued to appear in films, but they were intermittent and, apart from the spoof spy thriller, The Silencers (1966), in which she performed a stylish striptease, were resolutely unmemorable. From the 1970s she turned increasingly to television and appeared in episodes of such popular, long-running series as Hawaii Five-O and Murder, She Wrote. She also performed in a nightclub revue with her second husband, the singer Tony Martin, whom she married in 1948 after her divorce from Nico Charisse the previous year. They brought their act to the London Palladium in the 1970s.

Her stage appearances included an Australian production of No, No, Nanette in 1972, when she replaced a sick Betty Grable, and a revival of the British musical, Charlie Girl, in London in 1986, taking the part created by Anna Neagle. At 65, she showed she could still shake a shapely leg. Her Broadway debut came even later, in Grand Hotel in 1992.

In an interview in 2002 she compared the styles of her two most famous dancing partners, the muscular Kelly and the mellifluous Astaire, claiming that her husband always knew which of them she had been dancing with: “If I was black and blue, it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn’t have a scratch.”

Cyd Charisse is survived by her second husband, and by a son of her first marriage and a son from her second.

Cyd Charisse, dancer and actress, was born on March 8, 1922. She died on June 17, 2008, aged 86