Cyd Charisse has died, aged 87, in her home in Hollywood. There’s an obit up on the Telegraph, quote:
Cyd Charisse, the long-legged beauty who danced with the Ballet Russe as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, has died aged 87.
She appeared in dramatic films, but her fame came from the Technicolor musicals of the 1940s and 1950s.
Classically trained, she could dance anything, from a pas de deux in 1946’s “Ziegfeld Follies” to the lowdown Mickey Spillane satire of 1956’s “The Band Wagon” (with Astaire).
She also forged a popular song-and-dance partnership on television and in nightclub appearances with her husband, singer Tony Martin.
What I doubt many of the obituaries will mention is that she also had some contact with the European film industry, appearing in films like Terence Young’s French musical Black Tights (60), Mario Zampi’s now obscure caper Five Golden Hours (61), Gerry O’Hara’s spy flic Maroc 7 (67) and Kevin Connor’s adventure film Warlords of Atlantis (78). Possibly her most interesting of the bunch, though, was the 1965 Italian giallo, Assassinio made in Italy, an early example of genre in which she starred with Hugh O’Brien and Eleonora Rossi Drago.