R.I.P. Stanley Donen, co-director of Singin' In The Rain and legendary innovator of the Hollywood musical
Stanley Donen, a veteran Hollywood director whose career spawned possibly the most productive and innovative period in the history of the Hollywood musical, pushing the limits of the form with movies like Royal Wedding, Funny Face, and his celebrated (if emotionally fraught) collaborations with Gene Kelly, has died. Donen—one of the last greats of the Golden Age of Hollywood, honored in 1998 with an Honorary Academy Award “in appreciation of a body of work marked by grace, elegance, wit and visual innovation”—was 92.
Born in South Carolina, Donen got his start in show business as a Broadway dancer, serving as a member of the chorus line in musicals by the famed director George Abbot. (Donen was eventually fired as a dancer, but kept on in a behind-the scenes role, setting a precedent for much of his early career.) It was there that he met Kelly, 12 years his senior, and a rising star in the Broadway world. While the two men’s relationship would eventually break down into 40 years of passive aggression, public sniping, and bitter acrimony—it’s rarely a good sign for a creative partnership when one man marries the other’s recently divorced ex-wife—Kelly first served as a mentor for Donen, bringing him on as his personal choreographer. When they both ended up in Hollywood a few years later, the relationship would resume, producing some of the most innovative dance numbers in film history.
People have spent the better part of a century trying to tease out the exact nature of Kelly and Donen’s division of labor, with reports ranging from full mutual collaboration, to those who like to portray Donen as a glorified camera operator capturing Kelly’s genius. (A position that seems to miss the point that many of his and Kelly’s most beloved sequences are about the editing and the movement of the camera, as much as they are the fleetness of people’s feet.) For what it’s worth, Kelly would later credit Donen with the ideas for both the “dancing with his own reflection” sequence that helped make him a national star in Cover Girl, and the technically demanding “dancing with Jerry The Mouse” sequence from Anchors Aweigh. (Both men were aiming to snag Mickey Mouse instead, but such were the vagaries of the studio system.)
After proving themselves on the previous films, Kelly and Donen were given their own movies to co-direct, creating first On The Town—with its famous, shot-on-location rendition of “New York, New York”— and then the film that remains the pinnacle of both men’s careers, 1952's Singin’ In The Rain. Of the latter movie, it’s hard to find much to say that hasn’t already been said; presenting a loving satire of early Hollywood history, the film is that rare cinematic thing that’s capable of holding itself up proudly almost 70 years later, crystallizing Donen and Kelly’s ideas about the ways movies could transform and heighten the presentation of musical numbers beyond simple recreations of Broadway shows.