Vera-Ellen

Stars

Actress | Dancer Born Vera-Ellen Rohe on Feb. 16, 1921 in Norwood, OH

Vera-Ellen danced with Astaire, Kelly, Kaye, Bolger and O'Connor in the golden age of movie musicals.

Ellen was the star of such classics of the late 1940s and early 1950s as "On the Town," Words and Music" and "White Christmas."

A Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour winner at 13, she toured with a Bowes troupe and the Ted Lewis Band and worked as a member of the Rockettes at New York's Radio City Music Hall before making it to Broadway in a series of minor roles in the early 1940s.

After a good singing and dancing part in "A Connecticut Yankee," she was brought to Hollywood by Samuel Goldwyn, who teamed her with Danny Kaye in "Wonder Man" in 1945. The two were re-teamed the following year in "A Kid from Brooklyn."

She free-lanced "Three Little Girls in Blue" and "Carnival in Costa Rica" for Darryl Zanuck, then went to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for her first picture with Gene Kelly, "Words and Music," which featured the memorable "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" dance number.

Soon after, she starred with Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Ann Miller in "On the Town." In the 1950s came "Three Little Words" and "The Belle of New York" with Fred Astaire and "Call Me Madam" with Donald O'Connor and Ethel Merman.

She was reunited with Kaye in 1954 in "White Christmas," starring Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney.

A first marriage to an early dancing partner, Robert Hightower, ended in divorce in 1948. In 1954 she married oilman Victor Rothschild. That marriage ended in divorce in 1966. A daughter of that marriage, Victoria Elizabeth, died in infancy.

Ellen died of cancer on August 30, 1981.

— Dorothy Townshend in the Los Angeles Times September 2, 1981