Bob Fosse

Robert Louis Fosse (1927–1987) was an American dancer, choreographer, and film director whose angular, hat-tipping, hip-rolling style transformed Broadway musical theatre and Hollywood movie musicals. He remains the only person to have won the Tony, the Oscar, and the Emmy for directing in the same year, 1973.

Born in Chicago, he began dancing in vaudeville and burlesque clubs as a teenager under stage manager Frederic Weaver, an apprenticeship that exposed him to the bowler hats, white gloves, and sleazy showmanship that became his choreographic signature. After a stint in the US Navy and a brief contract at MGM, he choreographed his first Broadway musical, The Pajama Game, in 1954, winning his first Tony at twenty-seven.

He went on to choreograph or direct Damn Yankees, Sweet Charity, Pippin, Chicago, and Dancin', accumulating eight Tony Awards for choreography, a record that stood for decades. As a film director he made Sweet Charity (1969), Cabaret (1972), for which he won the Academy Award beating Coppola's The Godfather, the autobiographical All That Jazz (1979), and Star 80 (1983).

He had open-heart surgery in 1974, an episode he fictionalized in All That Jazz, and continued working at a punishing pace. He died of a heart attack on a Washington, D.C. sidewalk on the opening night of a revival of Sweet Charity in 1987, with his collaborator Gwen Verdon at his side, and was buried after cremation with his ashes divided among friends per his will.

The name Bob is a familiar form of Robert, derived from the Germanic Hrodebert, meaning "bright fame." It fit a man whose darkly stylish stage and screen work made him one of the brightest names in American showbusiness.