Dancer and actor who made her name in Technicolor Hollywood musicals and starred in the 1952 film Singin' in the Rain

Cyd Charisse, the Texan dancer and actor who made her name in the Technicolor glory days of Hollywood musicals, starring with Gene Kelly in the famous Broadway Melody Ballet scene in Singin' in the Rain, has died in Los Angeles aged 86.

Charisse suffered an apparent heart attack and was admitted to hospital on Monday, her publicist said.

Her exceptional dancing ability had emerged from a young age when, as a teenager, she appeared with the Ballet Russe. She came to the notice of movie-makers in the 40s who were transferring the disciplines of ballet onto celluloid.

"Honestly, the idea of working movies had never once entered my head," she wrote in an autobiography shared with her second husband, Tony Martin. "I was a dancer, not an actress. I had no delusions about myself. I couldn't act ... So how could I be a movie star?"

Despite her anxieties, she prospered in the new form, dancing with Kelly and Fred Astaire in Silk Stockings. At the height of her fame, MGM boasted that her legs were insured for $1m.

Her breakthrough came with Singin' in the Rain in 1952 when she astonished cinema-goers with her dancing skills, her flowing white dress and 25-foot Chinese silk scarf that floated in the air, blown by a wind machine.

Charisse, was born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Texas, in 1922. She married Nico Charisse, a dancer she had trained with in Los Angeles, in Paris in 1939. That marriage produced a son Nicky, and ended in divorce in 1947. She married Martin a year later, and entered a long double act with him of singing and dancing. The couple had a son, Tony Jr.

© Guardian News & Media 2008  Published: 6/17/2008

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