Michael Kidd

Who was Michael Kidd?

Michael Kidd was an American film and stage choreographer, dancer and actor, whose career spanned five decades, and staged some of the leading Broadway and film musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. Kidd was an innovator in what came to be known as the "integrated musical," in which dance movements are integral to the plot.

He was probably best known for his athletic dance numbers in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a 1954 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical, and for choreographing Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in the "Girl Hunt Ballet" and "Dancing in the Dark" numbers in the 1953 musical film The Band Wagon. Film critic Stephanie Zacharek called the barn-raising sequence in Seven Brides "one of the most rousing dance numbers ever put on screen."

Kidd, who was strongly influenced by Charlie Chaplin and Léonide Massine, was unusually well-respected, and his judgment was granted deference by the leading dancers of his era. British critic and biographer Michael Freedland said that "when Gene Kelly danced through the street with a dustbin lid tied to his feet in the 1955 film It's Always Fair Weather, the man who usually planned his own routines did it to Kidd's order.