Astaire quotes:

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  • Fred Astaire's got nothing on me. -- Si Robertson
  • I am the Fred Astaire of karate. -- Jean-Claude Van Damme
  • [Hugh Jackman is] an Adamantium-laced Fred Astaire. -- Jon Stewart
  • As a dancer, I out-Fred the nimblest Astaire. -- P. G. Wodehouse
  • Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat. -- Gene Kelly
  • Wrap up the 20th century; Fred Astaire is gone. -- Jack Kroll
  • From Fred Astaire I learned discipline and hard work. -- Dirk Benedict
  • I'm really influenced by Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. -- Cris Judd
  • Compositionally I always wanted to be like Fred Astaire. -- Morton Feldman
  • I can sing as well as Fred Astaire can act. -- Burt Reynolds
  • When Fred Astaire danced, everything in this world was perfect. -- Stanley Donen
  • Fred Astaire is the Carioca, the Continental, the very Piccolino of romance. -- Archie Frederick Collins
  • Mick Jagger moves like a parody between a majorette girl and Fred Astaire. -- Truman Capote
  • If Fred Astaire is the Cary Grant of dance, I'm the Marlon Brando. -- Gene Kelly
  • I want to do with skates what Fred Astaire is doing with dancing. -- Sonja Henie
  • Did any artist ever bring more pure joy to more people than Fred Astaire? -- Jack Kroll
  • I guess the only jewels of my life were the pictures I made with Fred Astaire. -- Rita Hayworth
  • I studied dancing for 13 years. And loved to dance. Always wanted to dance with Fred Astaire. -- Lauren Bacall
  • Fred Astaire was a more formal, trained dancer who loved waltzing and only danced with the girls. -- Leslie Caron
  • Astaire was not a sexual animal, but he made his partners look so extraordinarily related to him. -- Mikhail Baryshnikov
  • No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business. -- Mikhail Baryshnikov
  • My uncle, who was a little more flamboyant, always said the guy who dressed the best was Fred Astaire. -- Andy Garcia
  • After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels. -- Ann Richards
  • I dug up my dad's old Fred Astaire tapes, and now I find him super-inspiring. He's, like, one of the best dancers. -- Adam G. Sevani
  • I spent an entire evening seated between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, being charmed from either side. It was pure Hollywood magic. -- Lorna Luft
  • When Ginger Rogers danced with Astaire, it was the only time in the movies when you looked at the man, not the woman. -- Gene Kelly
  • I've always had an innate ability to dance, but I'm not as spiffy as those cinema legends like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. -- John Travolta
  • Dancing, as Fred Astaire said, is next to ditch-digging. You sweat and you slave and the audience doesn't think you have a brain in your head. -- Ann Miller
  • I was spawned by some pretty good people in this business - Mr. Astaire, Mr. Tracy. They stopped and took their time to talk to people. -- Robert Wagner
  • I've worked with Jack Warner and Jimmy Stewart - and Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp twice. I've had dinners with Fred Astaire and Cary Grant. -- Peter Guber
  • There's an old Fred Astaire movie where the stage becomes bigger and deeper and more complex. Moments like that really did impact on me and influence me. -- Kenny Ortega
  • The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography. -- Pauline Kael
  • Dancing in Tijuana when I was 13 "? that was my 'summer camp.' How else do you think I could keep up with Fred Astaire when I was 19? -- Rita Hayworth
  • I wish I was born in that era: dancing with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, going to work at the studio dressed in beautiful pants, head scarves, and sunglasses. -- Catherine Zeta-Jones
  • I wish I was born in that era: dancing with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, going to work at the studio dressed in beautiful pants, head scarves, and sunglasses. -- Catherine Zeta-Jones
  • I started dancing when I saw Fred Astaire in 'Flying Down to Rio,' at approximately nine years old. Fred Astaire influenced me, more than anything, to be in 'show business. -- Stanley Donen
  • When I was a kid, I loved Nicholas brothers films. It was like skateboarding. Even Gene Kelly: I always preferred him to Fred Astaire, just because he was more athletic, like skateboarding. -- Harmony Korine
  • What do dancers think of Fred Astaire? It's no secret. We hate him. He gives us a complex because he's too perfect. His perfection is an absurdity. It's too hard to face. -- Mikhail Baryshnikov
  • I started dancing when I saw Fred Astaire in 'Flying Down to Rio,' at approximately nine years old. Fred Astaire influenced me, more than anything, to be in 'show business.' -- Stanley Donen
  • I arrived in Hollywood twenty pounds overweight and as strong as an ox. But if I put on a white tails and tux like Fred Astaire, I still looked like a truck driver. -- Gene Kelly
  • As a dancer, obviously, we are all inspired by Michael Jackson, and I always looked up to Gene Kelly. He was a bigger version of Fred Astaire, and he was amazing as well. -- Maksim Chmerkovskiy
  • I remember seeing the first Astaire-Rogers musical on television, and I couldn't believe how beautiful it was. It dawned on me that you don't have to wear a cowboy hat to be a man. -- Edward Herrmann
  • Astaire never thought of what he was doing as balletic, but Kelly was always trying to dance with women on points. And his choreography is so showy and flashy. He always looks self-satisfied to me. -- Matthew Bourne
  • Fred Astaire is my hero. I love him because he was willing to kill himself to make his art look effortless. And because he proved it's possible to be an artist and a good person. -- Connie Willis
  • I asked Fred Astaire once when he was about my age if he still danced, and he said 'Yes, but it hurts now.' That's exactly it. I can still dance, too, but it hurts now! -- Dick Van Dyke
  • I wanted to be Stan Laurel, then I wanted to be Fred Astaire and then Captain Kangaroo. I actually started out as a radio announcer when I was 17 and never left the business, so that's literally 70 years. -- Dick Van Dyke
  • I love the old Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movies; they're so beautiful to look at. It's such a shame we don't make them anymore. Although, I don't know how you could make tap dancing current and topical. -- Jamie Bell
  • When I am cast in a movie where I feel that the woman's part is more interesting, I usually start thinking about Spencer Tracy and Fred Astaire. They seem to be the most clear actors when working with women. -- Jack Nicholson
  • Over the years, myths were built up about my relationship with Fred Astaire. The general public thought he was a Svengali, who snapped his fingers for his little Trilby to obey; in their eyes, my career was his creation. -- Ginger Rogers
  • I remember vividly seeing 'Tarzan' and Fred Astaire, the Chaplin films, Fred Astaire musicals, MGM, because of my mother. She was just interested in everything and she took me to opera and ballet, and then ballet got me hooked. -- Mikhail Baryshnikov
  • I grew up with the movies of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire and Judy Garland - these are the kinds of shows and the kinds of numbers in shows that I dreamed of being in and doing when I was a kid. -- Max von Essen
  • When I was young, I ran to see Astaire and Rogers, Huston, Lubitsch - they were formative for me. I also read 'Flash Gordon' when I was 6, but if I were still reading it when I was 16, I'd have been an imbecile. -- Lina Wertmuller
  • The thing is that my idols have always been the types of guys who could do anything: Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Sinatra, Dean Martin; and when you look up to people like that, you don't accept that you need to be compartmentalised. -- Justin Timberlake
  • While I was making my solo films, RKO was busily trying to get me and Fred Astaire back together. The studio wanted to capitalize on the success of 'Flying Down to Rio' and realized that the pairing of Rogers and Astaire had moneymaking potential. -- Ginger Rogers
  • What I got, unconsciously, from admiring Fred Astaire was that he didn't want what he was doing to look difficult. What was difficult, in my opinion, was making it look so genuine, so effortless. I equally have tried to remain unseen on the screen. -- Stanley Donen
  • Of course the Disney movies, you know all the soundtracks, and anything Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire were doing - Singing in the Rain was one of my favorite musicals I used to watch a lot because my mom came from a theatre background. -- Jillian Hervey
  • I loved old black and white movies, especially the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals. I loved everything about them - the songs, the music, the romance and the spectacle. They were real class and I knew that I wanted to be in that world. -- Sharon Stone
  • Because we are human, because we are bound by gravity and the limitations of our bodies, because we live in a world where the news is often bad and the prospects disturbing, there is a need for another world somewhere, a world where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers live. -- Roger Ebert
  • I was asked to act when I couldn't act. I was asked to sing 'Funny Face' when I couldn't sing, and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn't dance - and do all kinds of things I wasn't prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it. -- Audrey Hepburn
  • We attend to his later performances as a dramatic actor with respect, but watching the nondancing, nonsinging Astaire is like watching a grounded skylark. -- Fred Astaire
  • There comes a day when people begin to say: "Why doesn't that old duffer retire?" I want to get out while they're still saying Astaire is a hell of a dancer. -- Fred Astaire
  • It's nice that all the composers have said that nobody interprets a lyric like Fred Astaire. But when it comes to selling records I was never worth anything particularly except as a collector's item. -- Fred Astaire
  • Being young isn't about age, it's about being a free spirit. You can meet someone of 20 who's boring and old, or you can meet someone of 70 who's youthful and exciting. I met Fred Astaire when he was 72 and I was 21, and I fell in love with him. He certainly was a free spirit. -- Twiggy
  • I think there's no question that Michael Jackson was the foremost entertainer of his generation; perhaps of all time, arguably, taking the skills of a Sammy Davis, Jr., bringing together the street dance of African American urban culture, joining them to the politics of dance, of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly on that sphere alone. -- Michael Eric Dyson
  • I have a photograph at home of Fred Astaire from the knees down with his feet crossed. It's kind of inspiring because it reminds me his feet were bleeding at the end of rehearsals. Yet when you watch him, all you see is freedom. It's a reminder of what the job is about in general, not just being in musicals. -- Alan Rickman
  • I always loved all kinds of music. I would watch musicals a lot as a kid, on TV, watch the Fred Astaire movies. I'd watch 'The Wizard of Oz.' I was a big Jerry Lewis fan, and they'd have these big bands and someone singing - some siren, or some guy singing some gorgeous song. I was always enamored of that style of music. -- Queen Latifah
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