First you think of the legs — long, shapely and beckoning. You think of them in the film Singin’ in the Rain, thrusting out from her skimpy green dress towards a seriously impressed Gene Kelly. You think of them in Silk Stockings (the musical version of the Garbo comedy Ninotchka), as she memorably exchanges her black communist leggings for something silky and capitalist, with diaphanous underwear and satin slip to follow.

All dancers by necessity have legs, but among her dancing Hollywood colleagues of the 1940s and 1950s only Cyd Charisse could turn them into genuine objects of desire.

Charisse, dead at 87, was the last and sexiest of the great Hollywood hoofers from that era, long vanished, when musicals still gave movie audiences their headiest dose of escapist joy.

Then there’s the rest of Charisse: the attractive face, the visible intelligence and the usual accoutrements of the body beautiful. In his narration to the Girl Hunt Ballet, that Mickey Spillane parody from The Band Wagon, Fred Astaire may have informed audiences that “she came at me in sections, more curves than a scenic railway”, but in the 1950s, the era that gave us Cinerama, 3-D and Jayne Mansfield, Charisse’s curves never seemed exaggerated. Her physique was more than beautiful; it was actually believable.

And she could dance — how she could dance. You wouldn’t expect anything else from someone who trained in America as a child with Colonel de Basil’s Ballets Russes. Along the way this Texan teenager divested herself of her clunky name, Tula Ellice Finklea, and acquired poise, sophistication and a husband (her instructor, Nico Charisse). In 1943, aged 22, she was getting bit parts in the movies; three years later she had dazzled enough eyes to win her a contract at MGM, then the top studio for musicals.

But you need much more than charm, technique and a pliant body to be successful under a film camera’s gaze. The dancer must be someone the camera loves; without a vital spark of personality visible, we’re just watching a dancing doll.

Among the dancing ladies, that spark put Charisse in a class apart, and made her the perfect partner for Hollywood’s two male dancing gods, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, neither of them short of personality themselves. Eleanor Powell may have been a wizard tap dancer during the 1930s and early 1940s, but in all her MGM musicals she never once seemed a complete person.

Blonde, petite and pleasant, Vera-Ellen in the 1950s could twirl with the best, but that wasn’t enough to stop making her resemble a puppet with anorexia. For length of leg, Ann Miller could actually beat Charisse; she had ferocious energy too. But what lay behind her manic smiles and those rattling feet? Her enjoyment of the job: nothing less, nothing more.

With Charisse on top form, you always got more. When she danced she was also acting, drawing out emotions through gesture, pose and the body’s line, including some emotions that Hollywood’s production code of the time would probably not want to put into words. It was that way in Silk Stockings, as she discovered the thrill of sensuous lingerie. It was certainly so in the Band Wagon Girl Hunt Ballet, as she twirled, dangled, and sizzled — at her most provocative in long black gloves and a clinging, sparkly red dress, split to reveal those phenomenal legs. “She was bad,” said the hard-boiled Fred Astaire on the soundtrack, “she was dangerous. But she was my kind of woman.” Quite so.

The only drawback to Charisse’s career was that the decline of film musicals in the 1960s left her with nowhere to go. As a purely dramatic actress in the 1960s — in the corrosive Hollywood drama Two Weeks in Another Town, the secret agent thriller The Silencers and some lesser fry — she was competent, and pretty, but never truly distinctive. Words weren’t a handicap; they were just redundant. Music, lights and the dancefloor: those were all she needed to tell her stories, and cast her spell.

Leaders, page 2 and Obituary, main paper

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