Stanley Donen, director of Singin’ in the Rain and other classics of the golden age of Hollywood, has died. He was 94.
Singin’ in the Rain, from 1952, starred Donen’s co-director Gene Kelly and became a mainstay of popular culture. Donen was also a dancer and choreographer. Among other films he directed were the musicals On the Town (his first film, from 1949 and starring Kelly, his co-director, and Frank Sinatra), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and Funny Face (1957), starring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn.
He made four films with Cary Grant: Kiss Them For Me (1957), Indiscreet (1958), The Grass is Greener (1960) and Charade, also starring Hepburn (1963). His last theatrically released film was the Michael Caine sex comedy Blame It on Rio, which flopped in 1984.
Among tributes, the director Guillermo del Toro saluted “a brilliant storyteller” who he said was “elegant, exuberant, a master of color and [a] top crane choreographer” and added: “He had so much style and so much joy in him … We are indebted to him for as long as there is cinema.”
In a statement, Steven Spielberg said Donen “was a friend and an early mentor” who “made his most compelling movies in multiple genres”.
“Charade, Bedazzled and Two For the Road were my favorites,” Spielberg said. “When visiting New York I will miss not bumping into him on his daily walks and hear him talking about life and film, which for Stanley were inseparable.”
Donen was born in Columbia, South Carolina, on 13 April 1924. His career in Hollywood was so long, he told Vanity Fair in 2013, “sound was still a fairly new thing when I came into movies. And the reason musicals happened is because of sound. They could put music in the picture! That’s how it all began.”
In a tweet on Saturday which said one of Donen’s sons had confirmed his father’s death, the Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips said the director was “a huge, often neglected talent”.
Donen was never nominated for an Oscar but at the 1997 ceremony he was given an honorary award. Introducing it, the director Martin Scorsese, then himself unrecognised by the Academy, said: “Once upon a time, a lonely boy in South Carolina was sparked by the wonder of movies, captivated by everything from cowboys to comedians to movie monsters. And then he saw his first musical, Flying Down to Rio.”
In his Vanity Fair interview in 2013, Donen said: “I saw Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio when I was nine years old, and it changed my life. It just seemed wonderful, and my life wasn’t wonderful. The joy of dancing to music! And Fred was so amazing, and Ginger [Rogers] – Oh, God! Ginger!”
Donen danced on Broadway, where he met Kelly, with whom he worked as a choreographer in Hollywood. They worked closely together but ultimately the partnership was not a smooth one, as Donen told the New York Times in 1996.
“Gene, as a performer, was among the wonders of the 20th century,” he said. “His agility and his talents at being what he would call a song and dance man were very winning.
“What I didn’t like … was his manner offscreen. He could be difficult with me and everyone else. It was always a complicated collaboration, partly because when we began he was a star and I was in the chorus. Then we became co-choreographers. It wasn’t always the happiest thing.”
After Donen’s first marriage ended in divorce, Kelly married his ex-wife, Jeanne Coyne.
Accepting his Oscar from Scorsese, Donen focused on sunnier themes. “Tonight,” he said, “words seem inadequate. In musicals, that’s when we do a song.”
To the delight of the audience, he then sang and danced Cheek to Cheek, from the 1935 Astaire-Rogers classic Top Hat, with his statuette.
The secret of directing success, he confided, was to get the best writers, songwriters and actors and then, “when filming starts, you stay the hell out of the way.
“But you’ve got to show up, otherwise you can’t take the credit and get one of these fellas.”
Donen was married five times and had a famous affair with Elizabeth Taylor. In later years he was “happily unmarried” to the comedian, actor and director Elaine May, with whom he collaborated on theatrical projects.
In 2014, the Nickelodeon Theatre in Columbia staged a season of Donen’s films, entitled A Lotta Talent and a Little Luck. The organiser said: “Though so many people love his work, too few people know who he is, much less that he’s a native.”
Despite this, among film cognoscenti his place is secure. The British critic David Thomson, author of the New Biographical Dictionary of Film, called him “a central figure in the story of the MGM musical”.
This article was amended on 26 February 2018, to correctly identify Gene Kelly as co-director of Singin’ in the Rain