To all dancers, dance enthusiasts and tap dancers, join us in celebrating the Birthday of Eleanor Powell today, November 21, 1912.
Born Eleanor Torrey Powell in Springfield MA. Is a film actress, a movie Icon and a tap dance National Treasure. Dancing since childhood, Powell started as a ballet dancer, and became a tap dancer only by necessity as she told Jennifer Dunning in 1980.
As she was auditioning, in New York at the age of 16, showing her ballet and acrobatic skills, she was always asked Do you Tap? So she had to learn, as Dunning wrote Weeping through her first time step and picking it up at last after her teacher weighed her down with a gunbelt and ballasted her with sandbags.
Powell was discovered by Gus Edwards the head of the Vaudeville Kiddie Revue, she was only 11 years old. To Broadway by the age of 17 starring in several revues and musicals that garnered her the fame of being The world’s greatest tap dancer known for her Machine gun footwork.
In 1935 at the age of 23 she made the move to Hollywood, from a start in the George White’s 1935 Scandals to an MGM contract. Powell starred opposite many of the top leading men of the times such as Fred Astaire, James Stewart, Robert Taylor, George Murphy, Robert Young and Nelson Eddy. In Broadway Melody of 1940, she starred opposite Fred Astaire and both were featured in the acclaimed musical score by Cole Porter Begin the Beguine – see clip – to many it was considered the greatest tap feature in the big screen history.
It is worth mentioning Astaire’s entry in his autobiography Steps in Time about Eleanor. She ‘put ‘em down like a man’, no ricky-ticky-sissy stuff with Ellie. She really knocked out a tap dance in a class by herself.