Fred Astaire Part One
The state of Nebraska has been a home to many famous Americans that were (and sometimes still are) influential in creating the culture that shaped much of what makes America what it is today. Born in the tenth of May 1899, in Omaha, Nebraska, Frederick Austerlitz Jr. became one of those people who did Nebraska proud simply by coming from there. After all, only Nebraska could have the honor of being the birth state of one great Fred Astaire, arguably the most talented male performer of his time, and regarded by many (including American ballet figure George Balanchine and Russian ballet great Rudolf Nureyev) as the greatest dancer of the twentieth century. In the sixteenth of June 1999, the American Film Institute released a list called “One Hundred Years, One Hundred Stars” wherein Astaire was listed as the fifth Greatest Male Star of All Time.
Fred Astaire had fairly humble beginnings; his father Frederick E. Austerlitz, an Austrian immigrant, was a brewer while his mother Ann Gelius-Austerlitz was a first generation German-American and a housewife. Ann, who wanted to leave Omaha, had dreams of getting her children involved in show business as a brother-sister act; her daughter, Astaire’s older sister Adele, had proven early on that she had a knack for singing and dancing. She quickly set to work, and while young Fred hated dancing at first, he began to take his sister’s lead. This proved fortuitous as Austerlitz lost his job, and the family had to move to New York supported only by Fred and Adele’s incredibly successful vaudeville act; it was around this time, in 1905, that the siblings started to call themselves “Astaire”.
Despite the two-year hiatus they took in order to led Fred’s height catch up with his sister’s, the pair still drew audiences with their increasingly breathtaking routines. It was at this point that Fred’s dancing – which was more adventurous and novel compared to Adele’s – began to take center stage. In his quest to further improve himself, to make his dancing and their act more interesting, Fred Astaire came across a man with whose acquaintance would allow each of them to change their lives forever. In 1916, the paths of George Gershwin and Fred Astaire crossed. At the time, Gershwin was plugging songs in Jerome H. Remick’s. Not long after that, however, he was setting the music to acts of the Astaires.
(To be continued in the next post)
