When it came to making musicals nobody did it more extravagantly or lavishly than the Hollywood studios. Shortly after the Wall Street crash in the late 1920s and with the advent of sound, American people badly needed their flagging spirits lifted.

Fresh talent was always required and Hollywood sought out the very best from every corner of America. Gene Kelly was discovered in a Broadway show, starring as the lead in John O’Hara’s play ‘Pal Joey’ with words and music by Rodgers and Hart.

Elegant Astaire with his top hat and tails was replaced in people’s affections by the working man’s dancer. Kelly made his dancing seem so effortless, making him forever compulsive viewing in all of his screen roles.

MGM had embarked on a programme of musicals under legendary producer Arthur Freed that would last twenty years and he starred Kelly alongside Judy Garland in ‘For Me and My Girl’. It was a colossal success and the studio signed him at once to a seven-year contract.

In an all-star cast of ‘Thousands Cheer’ he danced with a mop in the first instance of his brilliant use of inanimate dancing partners. In 1945 he was partnered with a young Frank Sinatra in ‘Anchors Aweigh’, earning Gene his first Oscar nomination.

In this film he danced a superb innovative duet with Jerry the cartoon mouse. He was teamed again with Sinatra in ‘Take Me Out To The Ball Game’ and made his directorial debut on location in New York with him also starring in ‘On The Town’, where the returns at the box office were record-breaking.

In the ‘Three Musketeers’ he played D’artangan and was coached by world champion fencer Jean Heremens who he fought and ‘killed’ four or five times in the film in some of the best fencing scenes ever.

His biggest hit by far was ‘Singing in the Rain’ (left) and it would be the last great musical he would make. In the movie there were about seven dance routines of such breathtaking complexity that dancers the world over have studied them and often found that they were unable to reproduce them.

When the movie was complete and a huge box office success, Gene modestly underplayed his role in making it a smash. “It was the easiest of all my major dances. Technicians, who had to pipe two city blocks on the backlot with overhead sprays and the poor cameraman who had to shoot it through all that water, did the real work. All I had to do was skip down a sidewalk, climb a lamppost, have a drainpipe cascade on my face and jump around in puddles!”

It wasn’t quite as easy as Gene said it was, in fact he was feverish and unwell with a high temperature. His dancing and the lip-synching had to be split-second accurate. He had to hit marker after marker, which he could barely see on the underwater cobblestones that were very slippery and unsafe. He never missed one and that, according to millions of fans worldwide, is what ‘Singing in the Rain’ was all about.

He also choreographed and directed it and it was a brilliant send-up of all the razzmatazz that Hollywood was about when they first started talkies.

Over a fifty-year career that encompassed forty-four films, he paved a trail for younger dancers that choreographers are still trying to emulate. He took dancing away from the top hat and tails of the thirties and imprinted his ideas of it into an extension of natural movement.

He died on February 2nd 1996 at the age of eighty-three, leaving behind a wonderful, lasting legacy of his unique genius. He has been rediscovered by a new, younger generation who can only marvel at the balance and grace of this very gifted human being, who as an actor, choreographer, dancer, director and singer was more, much, much more than just a song and dance man.