Donald O'Connor

Donald David Dixon Ronald O'Connor, dancer, singer and actor: born Chicago 28 August 1925; married 1944 Gwendolyne Carter (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1954), 1956 Gloria Noble (two sons, one daughter); died Calabasas, California 27 September 2003.

One of cinema's finest dancers, Donald O'Connor gained an indelible place in movie history with his performance of "Make 'Em Laugh" in the classic musical Singin' in the Rain. The acclaim he received was the culmination of a lifetime's experience in show business. He had been a child performer in vaudeville, a child actor in films, a teenage star of "B" musicals in the Forties and leading man to Francis the talking mule in a series of hit comedies before Singin' in the Rain propelled him into major film musicals such as Call Me Madam and Anything Goes.

Born in 1925, O'Connor was the seventh child of an Irish immigrant who had been a circus performer before forming a vaudeville act with his wife (a former tightrope walker) and three eldest children. Donald said later, " 'The O'Connor Family' did an act which included singing, dancing, comedy, acrobatics and barrel- jumping, and it was a popular attraction on the major circuits."

The act was playing in Chicago when Donald was born. Thirteen months later he was on stage dancing the Black Bottom. ("I couldn't actually dance, but they held me up by the back of my shirt, and I moved my feet like crazy!") Just after his stage début, his five-year old sister was run over and killed, and three months later his father had a heart attack on stage and died. Other family members, including Donald, were added to the act by Mrs O'Connor, and, by the time he was four, Donald was performing a solo song and dance.

In 1936, Donald and his brothers Jack and Willy (who was to die of scarlet fever two years later) were signed by Warners to perform a speciality act in the film Melody for Two (1937). Though their number was cut from the film, it was seen by a Paramount talent scout, who cast Donald as Bing Crosby's brother in Sing You Sinners (1938). The sequence in which Crosby sang the Hoagy Carmichael/Johnny Mercer song "Small Fry" to the young O'Connor was a highlight of the film, and Paramount signed the 13-year-old to a contract.

He was given a starring role in the B movie Sons of the Legion (1938) as a juvenile delinquent who is helped by the sons of American Legionnaires and played a mischievous Huckleberry Finn in Tom Sawyer - Detective (1938), helping Tom solve a murder. In three subsequent films he played orphans, then finished his contract with his best-remembered role from this period, the youthful Beau who grows up to be Gary Cooper in Beau Geste (1939).

Having been told by the studio that he was growing too fast to play children any longer, he rejoined the family vaudeville act until 1941 when it finally disbanded - Mrs O'Connor retired and her eldest son, Jack, became a dance director at Warners.

Donald O'Connor auditioned unsuccessfully for the show Best Foot Forward on Broadway, then was sent by his agent to do a test for Universal. It was the height of the swing and jive era, and the studio had decided to get together the 12 "heppest" tap-dancers between the ages of 12 and 17 to form a group called the Jivin' Jacks and Jills. O'Connor and Peggy Ryan (who had auditioned with him for Best Foot Forward) were signed as part of the group, who were a highly talented bunch of energetic and individual dancers.

O'Connor was to confess later that he considered himself inferior as a dancer to most of the group, having been able to get away with doing the same routine for years on the vaudeville circuit:

Now I was working with all these great dancers, and it became embarrassing for me, because these kids could pick up a routine in five minutes - but I had charisma.

What's Cookin'? (1942) was to be the first of 14 films that the Jivin' Jacks and Jills appeared in over two years, low-budget and quickly made, but packed with boisterous dance routines in which each of the performers was given a chance to shine. O'Connor and Ryan were teamed because they were the tallest of the group, though Ryan later confessed,

I wanted to dance with Ronald Depree, who could do it all, but I got stuck with Donald . . . in the back! Then the original male lead, David Holt, suddenly couldn't do the part, so they promoted Donald to the lead. Every one of the kid dancers was pushing and shoving trying to attract attention and "become a star". Fortunately for me, Donald and I were paired off on a couple of numbers.

Audience response to the teaming of O'Connor and Ryan, both of whom were skilled in delivering comedy lines as well as in tap and eccentric dancing, was so positive that the studio continued to pair them and by the time they received star billing in Mr Big (1943) they were being called the B-movie version of Garland and Rooney.

With its story of teenagers turning a dramatic school's annual show into a song-and-dance musical despite the objections of some of the stuffier board members, Mr Big was typical of the vehicles in which the team starred, its running time crammed with dance numbers (choreographed by Louis DaPron) and the occasional song from the soprano Gloria Jean. Ryan (like her counterpart Judy Garland) was often to be found pining in the wings as O'Connor fell for a sweet-voiced heroine - Ann Blyth and Susanna Foster were others who filled that slot.

Less well-known than they should be, since B musicals are rarely revived or shown on television (unlike westerns or horror movies), these musicals were slight in plot but strong in song-and-dance content, and in 1944 two O'Connor-Ryan musicals, Chip off the Old Block and The Merry Monahans, were promoted to "A" status on cinema bills, and the team also performed a guest spot in the all-star Follow the Boys.

The same year O'Connor joined the USAAF Special Services Unit and he spent the next two years entertaining the troops, but Universal did not release his final musical with Ryan, Patrick the Great, until 1945 in order to keep his name before the public.

His first film back at the studio, Something in the Wind (1947), starred Universal's prime attraction Deanna Durbin, but O'Connor's comedy routine to the song "I Love a Mystery" was a highlight (and featured several bits of business he would re-use in "Make 'Em Laugh").

In Are You With It? (1948) O'Connor performed (with DaPron and Lew Parker) a dance purporting to demonstrate mathematical equations. Tap sounds are usually dubbed in later for film musicals, and, though some stars dubbed their own, DaPron would usually do O'Connor's. During this period, O'Connor made several appearances on Bing Crosby's radio show.

Yes Sir, That's My Baby (1949), O'Connor's first film in colour, was a weak musical, but the same year a low-budget comedy, Francis, in which O'Connor played a slow-witted soldier who is helped out of scrapes by a talking mule, proved an enormous hit, and over the next six years the actor starred in five more Francis films before declining a role in the seventh and last of the series, explaining, "When you've made six pictures and the mule still gets more fan-mail than you do, it has to be time to call it a day." Later he said of the films,

Lord, how I hated them! The animal stole every scene. I got so I couldn't act with real people. It was tough being upstaged by a jackass.

In 1951 O'Connor made a hit on television with The Donald O'Connor Show, a monthly segment of The Colgate Comedy Hour. It ran for three seasons and in 1953 he was awarded an Emmy as television star of the year. John Crosby, critic of the New York Herald Tribune, described O'Connor as "one of the greatest all-round talents in show business".

When the writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green first submitted their script for Singin' in the Rain (1952) to the producer Arthur Freed, the first person Freed suggested for the role of Cosmo, the hero's partner and piano player, was Oscar Levant. The co-director Stanley Donen later commented, "Betty, Adolph, Gene and myself were just frantic. We wanted a dancer for the part." They eventually got their way, and O'Connor proved ideal casting, providing a neat line of self-deprecating humour, matching Kelly in the dazzling tap routine "Moses Supposes", and using all his comic experience and vaudeville training to stunning effect in "Make 'Em Laugh", in which his use of props, facial expressions, acrobatic training and dance dexterity are splendidly showcased.

MGM immediately teamed O'Connor with Debbie Reynolds in another musical, I Love Melvin (1953), smaller in scale but full of felicitous moments, such as O'Connor's dance on roller-skates (two years before Kelly attempted a similar routine in It's Always Fair Weather), and a lively duet with Reynolds, "Where Did You Learn to Dance?" Both this and Call Me Madam (1953) were choreographed by Robert Alton, and O'Connor said later,

It wasn't until I worked with Gene Kelly and Bob Alton that I started to dance as, what I called, a total dancer . . . that I started dancing from the waist up, using my arms, my hands, and synchronisation in that way.

O'Connor's two duets with the underrated Vera-Ellen in Call Me Madam are among the finest ever put on film, and he also sang the score's big number "You're Just in Love" with Ethel Merman.

He returned to Universal for the undistinguished Walking My Baby Back Home (1953), then wooed Marilyn Monroe in Fox's big-budget Irving Berlin musical There's No Business Like Show Business (1954). His stature at this time was such that he was asked to host the 1954 Oscar ceremony, the first to be televised.

O'Connor was set to team with Bing Crosby in White Christmas when a leg injury forced him to withdraw. The film would have provided the opportunity for O'Connor to dance again with Vera-Ellen to Alton's choreography, and, though Danny Kaye proved a competent substitute, the studio were forced to bring in the Broadway dancer John Brascia to perform the more taxing duets with Vera-Ellen.

Donald O'Connor's last musical was Anything Goes (1956), co-starring Crosby and featuring some of the dancer's finest work, including a humorously romantic shipboard duet, "It's DeLovely" with Mitzi Gaynor, and a frenetic "Blow Gabriel Blow" at the film's climax. He was delighted to be given the leading role in The Buster Keaton Story (1957), a project close to his heart, but it turned out to be a bitter disappointment.

With musicals falling from fashion O'Connor concentrated on television and a new career as a composer of light symphonic music, saying, "I'm earning too much money in other mediums to pursue a dying genre." In 1955 he conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the world premiere of his symphony Reflexions d'un Comique, and television shows in which he appeared included a lavish version of Victor Herbert's The Red Mill with Barbara Cook, and The Gene Kelly Show.

During the 1960s he headlined in cabaret, toured in the musical Little Me, played a supporting role in the Bobby Darin-Sandra Dee comedy That Funny Feeling (1965), starred in an original television musical, Olympus 7-0000 (1966), and had his own television talk show. He continued with similar work throughout the next decade despite having problems with alcohol abuse and health (a heart attack and bypass surgery). He appeared at the London Palladium as a supporting act to Ginger Rogers, looking a lot chubbier than in his movie days, and in MGM's tribute to their greatest musicals, That's Entertainment (1976), he was one of the hosts.

In the 1981 movie Ragtime O'Connor played Evelyn Nesbitt's dance teacher - the same year he admitted publicly that he had conquered the drink problem that had plagued him for 25 years. He made his last appearance on Broadway as Cap'n Andy in a revival of Show Boat (1983), but continued to do concert and club work, sometimes appearing with his former co-star Debbie Reynolds. He made his final screen appearance at the age of 71 in the Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau comedy Out to Sea (1997).

O'Connor once said that he was never regarded himself highly as a performer because

that's just something I learned as a child, like breathing and eating. I was never impressed with myself being different from any other kid - I never knew what other kids were like because I was always with adults. Children used to frighten me. I thought they were strange little creatures, running around without any talent.

His classic solo in Singin' in the Rain, entirely conceived and improvised by the dancer himself, would alone be persuasive evidence that his talent was formidable. Gene Kelly said,

The number was his own and nothing was imposed on him, except for the finish. I wanted him to do the trick that he had done as a little boy in vaudeville. So we got his brother over to rehearse him with a rope to get his confidence back and then to break through the wall at the end. The rest was all his, and it was unbelievable.

Tom Vallance