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ET CETERATA
This dress, worn
by Ann Miller in
Easter Parade,
is part of the
Ransom Center’s
film collection.
Ransom Edition : : 12
Ann Miller, born Johnnie Lucille Collier on April
12, 1923 in Houston, Texas, began dancing lessons when she was five
as part of her therapy from an attack of rickets. Her parents divorced
when she was 10, and Ann and her mother moved to Hollywood,
where Ann got jobs dancing in various clubs and playing bit parts in
movies while being home schooled.
In the late 1930s, Miller was booked at the Club Bal Tabarin in San
Francisco. Lucille Ball was in the audience one night and saw Ann
dance. She persuaded her agent to give Miller a screen test at RKO
Studios where Ball was also under contract. Ann was signed to a
seven-year contract (she was only 13 but lied and said she was 18).
She debuted as a featured dancer in New Faces of 1937 (1937).
Her next film, and first acting role, was Stage Door (1937), in which
she was cast alongside Katherine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers. She
continued to act and dance in several low-budget features before
being loaned out to Columbia Pictures in 1938 for the role of the eccentric
Sycamore family’s fudge-making, ballet-dancing daughter in
You Can’t Take It With You, which won the Academy Award for best
picture of 1938. Miller asked to be let out of her contract with RKO
and soon headed to New York to appear in George White’s Scandals
on Broadway in 1939. Returning to Hollywood in 1940, she appeared
in a couple of films for Republic Pictures before signing with Columbia
Pictures in 1941, where she would star in a series of wartime musicals
and comedies.
(top) Ann Miller studio still
(above) Ann Miller and Peter Lawford in Easter Parade
When Cyd Charisse broke her leg, Ann auditioned for and won
the role of second female lead in MGM’s musical Easter Parade
(1948), which also starred Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, and Peter
Lawford. Her success in this film won Ann an MGM contract, and
she quickly became a member of Arthur Freed’s musical unit at
MGM, which included Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Judy
Garland, Vera-Ellen, Jane Powell, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin.
At MGM, she would make her best-remembered films, including On
the Town (1949) and Kiss Me Kate (1953). Her final film for MGM
was The Great American Pastime (1956) after which she retired
from film making.
Never out of the spotlight for long, Miller turned her attention to
television, nightclubs, and the stage. She was the last actress to
headline the Broadway production of Mame in 1969 and 1970.
In 1979, she and Mickey Rooney starred in the smash hit Sugar
Babies, in which she performed for nine years on Broadway and on
tour. Her last stage performance was in 1998 in Stephen Sondheim’s
Follies, in which she played the hardboiled survivor Carlotta
Campion, who sings the anthemic “I’m Still Here.” In 2001, she took
her last film role, playing Coco in director David Lynch’s Mulholland
Drive (2001). Ann Miller died January 22, 2004, in Los Angeles.
by Darnelle Vanghel