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On one occasion, Ginger Rogers confessed: "My mother told me that danced before birth, I could feel my fingers touching wildly inside her for months." And that sentiment came true when the extremely controlling and manipulative Lela Leibrand took it upon herself to put her only daughter on the right stage. It helped him to be part of the first group of female marines in the history of the United States.

After participating in vaudevilles and debuting on Broadway in 1929, that red-haired girl who was forced to dye blonde by studies , danced for the first time with Fred Astaire in Flying to Rio (1933). An experience that would be repeated in nine more films creating a unique chemistry wrapped in a magical halo that only black and white could transmit. As Garson Kanin commented: "The magic of Astaire-Rogers ... cannot be explained; it can only be felt."

The couple created a unique dance style where they flirted, wooed, jumped, shuddered and floated, but always under a condition imposed by the actor's wife, Phyllis, who opposed any graphic display of authentic emotion. The merry divorcee (1934), Top hat (1935) or Let's follow the fleet (1936) are still engraved on the retina of several generations . Those fabulous legs that made the audience dream were secured at a million dollars (920,000 euros at that time), a record that years later Cyd Charisse managed to match , who everyone remembers for his spectacular dance number in a green dress and fringes with Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain (1952).

With Fred Astaire, in the 50's.

Despite the rumors about their bad relationship, Rogers commented in an interview in the 70s that "I adore the man. I have always adored him. The happiest thing was to have joined Fred. He was everything a little girl with eyes crashed from a small town I had dreamed of. " And of course, Astaire, with her gentleman gestures , confessed before dying that "all the girls I danced with thought they couldn't do it, so they always cried. All except Ginger. No, no, Ginger never cried." The rickety and talented Katharine Hepburn said of them that "Ginger brings sensuality and he, class."

She did not cry, but she was angry. While Greta Garbo fought fiercely for salary parity between the sexes, Ginger complained about charging much less than her dance partner who, incidentally, also controlled all the choreography. Reluctantly, he managed to get his weekly salary to increase every year after he went on strike.

The interpreter wanted to show her versatility in other types of roles and in 1940 she won her only Oscar for best actress for Mirage of love, where she did not dance in any scene. Two years later, she starred in the Hollywood debut of the witty and sarcastic Billy Wilder in El mayor y la menor (1942), in which plot her fictional mother really was the real thing. Ela's power and influence over her daughter was beyond the limits of sanity.

Little by little, she was one of the highest grossing actresses of the time. But unlike other contemporary colleagues like Marlene Dietrich, who invested part of her fortune in diamonds, rubies and emeralds from Van Cleef & Arpels, Cartier or Trabert & Hoeffer Mauboussin or Greta Garbo, who bought countless pictures and pieces of art from Kees van Dongen or Jawlensky, the Rogers preferred to buy a huge 720 acre ranch in the state of Oregon.

There he would sneak out of the mundane Hollywood to enjoy hobbies as banal as fishing, tennis, horseback riding or swimming. He took refuge there after the death of his mother in 1977. His was a love relationship so toxic that when the actress died, she was buried next to her mother and several meters from Fred Astaire. Privately, she was always a tremendously familiar woman who was very proud that her great-great-grandfather had discovered quinine as a treatment for malaria.

In the middle of the Hollywood Witch Hunt where many companions denounced others for their communist ideas, Lela and Ginger were in the spotlight. Under maternal influence, the actress, a devoted Republican , indirectly pointed to some victims, as Lela confessed that writer and screenwriter Donald Trumbo forced Rogers to utter the phrase "share and share alike, that's democracy" in the film Companion of my life (1944). Behind that Puritan image, it seems that the devil himself had possessed the actress according to what the filmmaker Joseph Losey, who was blacklisted, would say: "Ginger Rogers was one of the worst and most terrifying reactionaries in Hollywood."

Of course, the 1940s was not very pleasant. His bad nose for choosing roles prevented him from starring in great classics in film history such as New Moon (1940), played by Rosalind Russell; Living is beautiful! (1940), starring Donna Reed or Bola de Fuego (1941), which ended up with Barbara Stanwyck. But he also had lucky breaks, like when he replaced Judy Garland in Come Back to Me (1949) because he was always late for filming due to his drug addiction.

During his most splendid stage, Ginger used to organize parties in his Hollywood mansion where alcohol was conspicuous by his absence. He was teetotaler and took it to heart. They were undoubtedly one of the most boring evenings in the community as they typically consisted of parlor games and ice cream made on his own machine that helped him publicize a healthy image.

While his film career began to wane in the early 1950s, his sentimental life also watered. She was married five times (Jack Pepper, Lew Ayres, Jack Briggs, Jacques Bergerac and William Marshall), never regretted not having children, had romances with James Stewart, Cary Grant and was about to say "yes, I want" to the billionaire producer and womanizer Howard Hughues, whose sheets also frolicked Yvonne de Carlo, Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner or Joan Fontaine. But finally, the Rogers backed down: "He was too possessive."

In 1965 he retired from the cinema with the biopic about Jean Harlow, Harlow , where he played the mother of the former sex symbol. From then on, she starred as a guest star on several television series, toured the country with music, and had tremendous success on Broadway with Hello, Dolly (1966).

In the last years of his life, his health deteriorated. He suffered two strokes and gained weight, so he had to use a wheelchair. However, he never lost his sense of humor, except when Fellini shot the movie Ginger and Fred (1987) with Marcello Mastroianni and Giulietta Massina. She felt that they were laughing at her and tried to bring the director to trial without success.

His last great public tribute was when he was presented with Paul Newman or Mstislav Rostropóvich the Kennedy Prize, the highest distinction awarded by the President of the United States to a personage of culture. But their moment was obscured because Robyn Smith, widow of Fred Astaire, refused to give up the rights to the images in which the couple danced. The Kennedy Center refused to pay him, and Rogers received his honor without the retrospective video clip. On April 25, 1995, he died at the age of 83 from angina.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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